Carlyle Group and TPG Capital are in talks over a potential stake acquisition in Reliance Infratel, the tower business of Indian mobile operator Reliance Communications (Rcom), Bloomberg reported.
Other private equity firms, including Apax Partners and…
Carlyle Group and TPG Capital are in talks over a potential stake acquisition in Reliance Infratel, the tower business of Indian mobile operator Reliance Communications (Rcom), Bloomberg reported.
Other private equity firms, including Apax Partners and Blackstone, are also considering a stake purchase, wrote the newswire.
In late May, RCom had announced that it received offers from several parties for Infratel. “The board noted that, based on the indicative offers, completion of such a transaction would facilitate RCom’s stated objectives of achieving a substantial reduction of its overall debt position, and staying well within its target long term leverage ratios,” the company wrote in a statement.
This followed previous reports suggesting that the mobile operator, saddled with about US$7bn in net debt, was struggling to sell 50,000 of the Infratel towers.
About a year ago, RCom had agreed an US$11bn tower merger between Infratel and another towerco, GTL, but this collapsed last summer on alleged valuation differences.
More recently, in late March, US-based independent towerco American Tower was quoted saying that it was not interested in Infratel, since its Indian efforts were completely focused on consolidating the towers it acquired from Essar Telecom Infrastructure.
That same month, RCom signed a US$1.93bn syndicated loan with China Development Bank (CDB) to refinance part of its debt used for 3G spectrum fee payment and equipment imports from Chinese vendors. The company recently announced that it had drawn the third and final tranche of the facility worth Rs12bn (US$268m).
The company could not be reached for comment before the press deadline.
