Bharti Airtel to divest telecom tower assets in Zambia, Rwanda to HIS

Bharti Airtel Ltd. | Telecommunication - Service Provider | Telecom | BSE: 532454 | NSE: BHARTIARTL

15 Dec 2014 Evaluate

Bharti Airtel and IHS Holding, the largest mobile telecommunications infrastructure provider in Africa, have entered into an agreement under which IHS will acquire over 1100 telecoms towers across 2 countries. Airtel will sell and lease back over 1100 towers from IHS in Zambia and Rwanda under a 10-year renewable contract.

The agreements will allow Airtel to focus on its core business and customers, enable it to deleverage through debt reduction, and will significantly reduce its on-going capital expenditure on passive infrastructure in these African markets.

For IHS, the acquisition is another major step towards the scale needed to provide shared telecoms infrastructure solutions in Africa. IHS customers, the mobile network operators, will benefit from lower operating costs, expanded network coverage and accelerated network roll out times, higher network capacity and improved quality of service. The consequences for the mobile subscribers will be more stable networks, higher network uptimes in which to make calls and a more ubiquitous service across the country.

Bharti Airtel is a leading integrated telecommunications company with operations in 20 countries across Asia and Africa. The company ranks amongst the top 5 mobile service providers globally in terms of subscribers.