Airtel Africa weighs London, NSE listings

Airtel Africa plc, secondlargest mobile operator in the continent by subscriber base, is planning a premium listing of its shares on the Official List of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and admission to trading on the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange (LSE).

Thereafter, the telco will do a potential secondary listing on the Nigeria Stock Exchange (NSE).

Airtel Africa plc’s expected IPO registration document seen by Businessday shows that if the company decides to proceed with a listing on the Nigerian Stock Exchange ( NSE), the earliest that this could happen will be at the time of Admission.

The syndicate firms in the transaction are J.P. Morgan Cazenove, BAML, Citi JBRS, Standard Bank, ABSA, Barclays, BNPP, GS and HSBC. Announcement of the planned listing comes barely

two weeks after MTNN listed by introduction its 20.35 billion units on the NSE at N90 per share.

In the initial public offering of the Ordinary Shares, Airtel Africa targets 100 percent primary proceeds with expected free-float of 25 percent minimum.

The move would see the continent’s second- biggest mobile operator freely float at least a quarter of its shares and use the proceeds to reduce net debt, according to the Offer document.

“Airtel Africa is a leading telecom and payment service operator with leadership and scale across our footprint,” said Raghunath Mandava, the Group’s chief executive.

“The 14 countries where we operate offer strong GDP growth potential and have young and fast-growing populations, low customer and data penetration and inadequate banking infrastructure. These fast- growing markets provide us a great opportunity to grow both our telecom and payments businesses.”