MTN is close to owning the towers it walked away from a decade ago. Africa's biggest mobile operator has moved a step closer to buying the rest of IHS Holdings, the continent's largest tower company, after IHS shareholders approved the deal at a special meeting on 4 August. The all-cash offer values IHS at about 6.2 billion dollars, roughly 101 billion rand, and MTN is paying to mop up the roughly three-quarters of the company it does not already own.
Getting the band back together
MTN and IHS go back a long way. The two have been partners since 2012, and IHS grew in part by taking over towers that operators like MTN built and then sold off, part of an industry-wide shift toward renting rather than owning the steel. This deal reverses that. Once it closes, MTN will reintegrate around 29,000 African towers, while IHS sells out of its non-African operations in Latin America and Kuwait. Owning the towers again is meant to cut the long-term rental bills MTN has been paying and hand it more control over where it rolls out 5G and fibre next. The price on the table, 8.50 dollars a share, was first set out back in February at a 36% premium to IHS's average share price over the prior year.
Why towers, and what's left to clear
For CEO Ralph Mupita, the towers are not a side bet. He called the shareholder nod "an important step toward completion of the Transaction" and framed towers as "a critical value-creation driver" inside MTN's Ambition 2030 strategy, especially as digital infrastructure and AI become more central to how Africa grows. The deal is funded through a mix: MTN rolls over its existing stake of around 24%, adds about 1.1 billion dollars of its own cash and draws roughly 1.1 billion from IHS's balance sheet. The vote clears one of the last big conditions, but not all of them, and MTN says some approvals are still outstanding. Once everything is signed off, IHS is taken private and folded into MTN as a wholly owned subsidiary.
The year-long chase is nearly over. What is left is the paperwork, and the question of how quickly owning its own towers pays off in a faster, cheaper network.
