Bharti Airtel considers IPO for a tower unit

Bharti Airtel BSE | NSE 31/05/12 Are Mutual Funds betting on Bharti Airtel?

Bharti Airtel on Friday said that it is looking at listing one of its tower units Bharti Infratel or Indus in the next fiscal. While Infratel is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bharti, Indus is a joint venture with Vodafone and Idea Cellular.

"It is possible that we could look at the initial public offering of Infratel or Indus next fiscal looking at their financial fundamentals," Bharti Enterprises Group CFO, Mr Manik Jhangiani, said.

Bharti Airtel and Vodafone hold 42% stake each in Indus and the remaining 16% is held by Idea Cellular. There are over one lakh towers under Indus and about 29,800 towers are owned by Bharti Infratel. The sharing factor, which is the average number of operators sharing each tower, for Indus is 1.66 and 1.57 for Infratel.

The IPO could be part of Airtel's plan to unlock value in the tower infrastructure company. Passive infrastructure generated Rs 926-crore revenue for Bharti during the third quarter ended December 31, 2009, which is about 9% of the company's total revenues. The company invested Rs 192 crore in passive infrastructure during the third quarter which is 11% of overall investments.

Taken from

The Hindu Business Line