(Yemen Observer)- - YemenMobile Company has sold more than 70 percent of the shares allocated for public subscription, the company said. Mohammed al-Dhahbani, executive director of the company, said that 12,400,000 shares have been sold. The date of selling was extended until all the rest of the shares are sold.

He said that after the selling of shares, the company will start to finalize other legal measures. It will announce the company as an official shareholding company, and establish a general assembly of the company, electing a board to run the company’s activities. The process of the sale of shares was started in June of this year, with a goal of selling 17,304,802 shares of the company’s of 86 million shares, at a capitalization of YR 43.2 billion.

Shares are sold to the public through three schemes, at 500 YR per share. The first scheme sells 10 percent of the shares to employees of YemenMobile and employees of the Ministry of Telecommunications. The second scheme compromises 15 percent of the total shares, and these are being sold to banks, funds, and corporations. The third scheme sells 15 percent to individuals, as well as 5 percent to the private sector. These entities will be able to buy a minimum of 4,000 shares and a maximum of 120,000 shares.

The remaining 21 percent is to be sold directly to the public at a minimum of 20 shares and a maximum of 4,000 shares. YemenMobile announced that its number of subscribers reached 500,000 in less than two years of operations, which exceeds their target of 320,000 by 36 percent. In 2004, president Ali Abdullah Saleh inaugurated YemenMobile. The government-owned company presented a challenge to the two other private mobile phone companies, Sabafon and Spacetel, by slashing call rates by almost 50 percent.

The project’s cost exceeds $71 million, the official Saba news agency reported. The company uses the CDMA system, or code division multiple access, which is widely used in North America, Japan, South Korea and China. GSM, or global system for mobile communications, covers 70 percent of the world’s wireless phone users.