New RCom would be a B2B company with half its revenues coming from overseas: Anil Ambani

​Ambani said the company had received 75 expressions of interest for sale of its various assets and definitive documents were at an advanced stage of negotiation with the entire process being overseen by a committee headed by Reserve Bank of India deputy governor SS Mundra.

“All the final binding bids have already been received by the lenders and we expect a full and financial closure of all the transactions for all the modules that we are running to be completed between January and March 2018 which is the next three months,” Ambani said at a press conference in Mumbai. He said the entire monetization process was to be solely used to prepay the debt of the lenders.

Those words from the junior Ambani sent shares of his company soaring to the day’s high of Rs. 23 before closing the session at Rs. 21.33 on the BSE, still up as much as 30.78 per cent from Friday’s close. Markets were closed Monday on account of Christmas.

He said the company’s asset monetization programme comprised five modules related to its wireless business and 125 acres at its Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge City campus in Navi Mumbai. The five modules of the mobile business included the company’s spectrum portfolio, its 40,000 towers, optic fiber network, mobile switching nodes spread over 5 million square feet of space and real estate that is not part of the Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge City campus.

Ambani said the company had also run a process, run by real estate consultancy Jones Lang LaSalle, to select a contractor to develop and monetize 20 million square feet at the knowledge city. According to him, bids from five developers had been received for the purpose. He said HDFC Realty had pegged the gross proceeds from the development of the land at Rs. 25,000 crores. He said a special purpose vehicle holding this real estate will have long-term debt financing of Rs. 10,000 crores on a non-recourse basis.

Speaking on the shape the company would take once the debt resolution is put behind, Ambani said the new Reliance Communications would be a B2B company with 90 percent of its revenues being annuity in nature and half the revenues coming from overseas.

Ambani said the company had also received non-binding interest from nine companies to acquire strategic stake in it, pegging its enterprise value, post all the restructuring and debt pre payments, at Rs. 15,000 crores.

The stripping down of Reliance Communications’ business is an outcome of the onslaught of competition brought in by the second coming of Mukesh Ambani in telecom when his company and Reliance Industries subsidiary Reliance Jio Infocomm launched its services.

The entry of Jio has led to a spate of mergers and acquisitions in the sector which has seen Bharti Airtel acquiring Telenor and Tata Teleservices’ business, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular merging and Reliance Communications shutting most of its wireless business. The Anil Ambani company spared the international voice traffic business, consumer broadband and 4G post-paid dongle services from the axe. These businesses have been moved to the company’s enterprise segment.

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