Indian cellco Bharti Airtel is considering listing its telecom tower business, Bharti Infratel, its CFO Manik Jhangiani reportedly said during the company’s second quarter results. He added, however, that there was no definite plan for the IPO.
Bharti…
Indian cellco Bharti Airtel is considering listing its telecom tower business, Bharti Infratel, its CFO Manik Jhangiani reportedly said during the company’s second quarter results. He added, however, that there was no definite plan for the IPO.
Bharti Infratel is a wholly-owned unit of Bharti Airtel that operates telecom towers across 18 Indian states. It also holds a 42% stake in Indus Towers – a joint venture between Infratel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular.
Meanwhile, Bharti Airtel is looking to start repaying between US$800m-US$900m of the US$7.5bn loan it borrowed to buy the African assets of Kuwaiti company Zain, according to Jhangiani cited by local reports.
A few days ago, a banker was quoted as saying that the banks that underwrote the loan struggled to syndicate it at a profit and were therefore requesting a prepayment.
But the company reportedly said that flexibility of prepayments had always been part of the loan agreement and that free cash flows were allowing it to start repaying part of the debt.
Bharti Airtel launched the 4.4-year US$7.5bn multi-tranche loan in August. The facility was split into four amortising tranches, with lenders invited to participate on tickets equivalent to US$50m, US$35m-US$49m, US$25m-US$34m and US$15m- US$34m, paying 55bp, 50bp, 45bp and 40bp, respectively.
The loan pays a blended margin of 180.6bp over Libor and the arranger group initially included 11 lenders. Bank of Nova Scotia, Chinatrust Commercial Bank and National Bank of Kuwait subsequently joined the syndication after the company extended the September 13 deadline by a couple of weeks.
