Airtel to sell telecom tower assets in Zambia and Rwanda to IHS

Telecommunications services provider Bharti Airtel Limited (Airtel) which has operations in 20 countries across Asia and Africa and African telecommunications infrastructure provider IHS Holding Limited (“IHS”) have signed agreements under which IHS will acquire over 1,100 telecom towers in Zambia and Rwanda.

The agreements will allow Airtel to focus on its core business and customers, besides enabling it to deleverage through debt reduction. They will also 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 telecom 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.

The agreements are subject to statutory and regulatory approvals.

Christian de Faria, MD & CEO – Africa, Bharti Airtel said, “We are delighted to partner with IHS, which has a proven track record in passive infrastructure management in Africa and look forward to working with them. This agreement will accelerate infrastructure sharing amongst operators and benefit customers in form of affordable tariffs and wider network coverage.”

Issam Darwish, Executive Vice Chairman and Group CEO of IHS, commented, “We have been working with Airtel for many years. And we are very pleased to have signed our first Buy and Lease Back transaction with Airtel.  The opportunity to expand our East African business bringing IHS’ market leading energy and infrastructure management practices to a wider market is an excellent opportunity.  We are very excited that following this deal more mobile phone users will benefit from the efficiencies and increased network uptimes that will result.”