Bharti

Airtel to divest telecoms tower assets in Zambia and Rwanda to IHS

New Delhi, December 15, 2014: Bharti Airtel Limited (“Airtel”), a leading global telecommunications services provider with operations in 20 countries across Asia and Africa [through its subsidiary company Bharti Airtel International (Netherlands) BV (“Airtel”)], and IHS Holding Limited (“IHS”), the largest mobile telecommunications infrastructure provider in Africa, today announced an agreement under which IHS will acquire over 1100 telecoms towers across 2 countries.

Highlights

• Airtel to sell and lease back over 1100 towers from IHS in Zambia and Rwanda under a 10-year renewable contract
• IHS expands its Africa tower footprint to over 21,000 towers across 5 countries
• Will help drive cost efficiencies throughout the industry via the use of shared passive infrastructure

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.

The agreements are subject to statutory and regulatory approvals.

Commenting on the development, 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.”

About Bharti Airtel:

Bharti Airtel Limited is a leading global telecommunications company with operations in 20 countries across Asia and Africa. Headquartered in New Delhi, India, the company ranks amongst the top 4 mobile service providers globally in terms of subscribers. In India, the company's product offerings include 2G, 3G and 4G wireless services, mobile commerce, fixed line services, high speed DSL broadband, IPTV, DTH, enterprise services including national & international long distance services to carriers. In the rest of the geographies, it offers 2G, 3G wireless services and mobile commerce. Bharti Airtel had over 305 million customers across its operations at the end of October 2014. To know more please visit, www.airtel.com

About IHS:

IHS is Africa’s leading independent mobile telecommunications infrastructure provider. Founded in 2001, IHS provides services across the full tower value chain – managed services, deployment and site ownership. IHS Towers has operations in Nigeria, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Zambia and Rwanda. Following these transactions, IHS will manage over 21,000 towers in Africa. For more information visit: www.ihstowers.com