Airtel Africa Limited, a subsidiary of India’s Bharti Airtel Limited, has announced that it had raised $1.25 billion from six global investors. Among the new investors are SoftBank Group Corp, Warburg Pincus LLC and Temasek Holdings (Private) Limited.
The $1.25 billion fund, which was sourced through a primary equity issuance, now values the telco at $4.4 billion and will be used to reduce existing debt of about $5 billion and grow its Nigeria and other Africa operations.
Chief Executive of Bharti Airtel’s Africa Unit, Raghunath Mandava, noted that the transaction will help Airtel to further deleverage its balance sheet and boost capacity to upgrade networks, expand coverage in different markets and achieve rapid growth of Airtel Money across operations.
The race for market share
Recently the telecom-giant announced that it has partnered with three of the leading phone brands in Nigeria – Infinix, Itel, and Tecno – to offer increased value delivery to customers. The strategic partnership is some sort of sales promotion which works in such a way that Airtel customers get to enjoy a special data package “Double Data Offer’ every time they buy any of the phone brands.
By implication, every time an Airtel customer buys either an Infinix, Itel or Tecno phone, they will enjoy double the value of every data plan they buy henceforth. The double data value package would then last until six months after the initial phone purchase, allowing customers to enjoy increased internet connectivity.
In a monthly report for September by NCC, Airtel has the second largest market share with 26% of the market share, while MTN is tops with 39.68% of market share.
Airtel Nigeria is one of the top four telecoms service providers in Nigeria. It is a subsidiary of Bharti Airtel Limited which is headquartered in New Delhi, India.
