Airtel Enters Into Sell & Lease Agreement With IHS In Africa

Indian telecom major, Bharti Airtel has announced to sell and lease back telecom towers from Africa’s largest telecom service provider, IHS Holding Limited. The companies have entered into a ten-year long contract under which Airtel will sell 1,100 telecom towers located in Zambia and Rwanda.

“The agreements will allow Airtel to focus on its core business and customers, enable it to de-leverage through debt reduction, and will significantly reduce its on-going capital expenditure on passive infrastructure in these African markets,” the company stated in its filing with the National Stock Exchange (NSE).

It further added, “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”.

The company, through the divestment, aims to increase the cost efficiencies of its operations in the industry. “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,” said Christian de Faria, managing director and CEO of Africa, Bharti Airtel.

Commenting on the issue, Issam Darwish, executive vice chairman and Group CEO of IHS, noted, “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.”

The proposed deal is subjected to regulatory approvals in both the countries.

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