Bharti Airtel has acquired another 1% stake in Indus Towers for an undisclosed sum via an all-cash block deal, boosting its stake in the telecom tower company to 48.95% and inching closer to having a majority ownership.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2026 a Special Committee of Directors for evaluation of stake in Subsidiaries and Joint Ventures\u2019 has today approved the acquisition of upto 27 million equity shares in Indus Towers in accordance with the applicable regulations. Accordingly, with the aforesaid approval of the Special Committee, the Company has acquired ~26.95 million (i.e. 1%) equity shares of Indus Towers today on-market,\u201d Bharti Airtel said in an NSE filing Wednesday. <\/p>\n
Earlier this year, Airtel managing director Gopal Vittal had said that the Sunil Mittal-led telco \u2014 the largest stakeholder of Indus Towers — is committed to ensuring the tower company remains strong, and that it won\u2019t hesitate to take over the reins to prevent any instability caused by key customer, Vodafone Idea\u2019s financial challenges.<\/p>\n
However, in the backdrop of Vi\u2019s recent capital raise, Airtel chairman Sunil Mittal had recently told ET that Vi must clear all of Indus\u2019 past dues, failing which, the struggling telco won\u2019t be allowed to use the tower company\u2019s infrastructure for any new services such as 5G. Vi is reckoned to owe nearly Rs 10,000 crore in old dues (including interest) to Indus.<\/p>\n
Airtel\u2019s acquisition of additional shares in Indus come even as UK\u2019s Vodafone Plc is set to sell nearly 18% ownership \u2014 out of its 21.05% stake \u2014 in Indus Towers today via block deals, according to a revised term sheet issued by the British carrier\u2019s bankers.<\/p>\n
Shares of Indus were down 4.55% to Rs 328.25 in Wednesday morning trade on the BSE, while Airtel shares were trading 1.17% lower at Rs 1,412 on the exchange.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bharti Airtel has acquired another 1% stake in Indus Towers for an undisclosed sum via an all-cash block deal, boosting its stake in the telecom tower company to 48.95% and inching closer to having a majority ownership. \u201c\u2026 a Special Committee of Directors for evaluation of stake in Subsidiaries and Joint Ventures\u2019 has today approved the acquisition of upto 27 million equity shares in Indus Towers in accordance with the applicable regulations. Accordingly, with the aforesaid approval of the Special Committee, the Company has acquired ~26.95 million (i.e. 1%) equity shares of Indus Towers today on-market,\u201d Bharti Airtel said in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-823960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-telecom"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=823960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823960\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=823960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=823960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=823960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}