NEW DELHI, India, Aug 11 – Bharti Airtel’s Board of Directors has approved the acquisition of 100 percent of Telecom Seychelles Limited, the leading telecom operator of Seychelles, for an enterprise value of USD62 million.
With this acquisition, Bharti Airtel will expand its African footprint to 16 countries and its overall presence to 19 countries. Bharti Airtel had recently acquired the mobile operations of Zain group in 15 countries across Africa.
Manoj Kohli, CEO (International) & Joint. MD, Bharti Airtel, said: “We are delighted at the addition of Seychelles to our Africa portfolio. Telecom Seychelles has world-class operations that include state-of-the-art 3G services. These operations will benefit further by leveraging the efficiencies of scale of our African operations.”
Telecom Seychelles began operations in 1998 by launching mobile services. Today, it offers 3G mobile and integrated wireline services across the island nation under the Airtel brand and has over 57 percent share of the mobile market.
Bharti Airtel Limited has operations in 18 countries across Asia and Africa. The company offers mobile voice and data services, fixed line, high speed broadband, IPTV, DTH, turnkey telecom solutions for enterprises and national as well as international long distance services to carriers. Bharti Airtel had over 183 million customers across its operations at the end of June 2010.
