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Vodafone has announced today that it has sold its remaining 79.2 million shares in Indus Towers Limited, a 3% stake in the company
The sale raised INR 28 billion ($330 million), according to a recent stock market filing. Vodafone used $105 million of this to repay loans tied to its Indian assets and cover transaction costs.
The remaining $225 million was invested in its Indian mobile subsidiary Vodafone Idea (Vi), increasing the company’s stake in the operator from 22.56% to 24.39%. Vi will use these funds to settle outstanding payments to Indus Towers, thereby completing Vodafone’s financial commitments to the company.
Vodafone has gradually been divesting of its Indus Towers stake since 2022, gradually reducing its stake from 28% to 21.5% last year. In June, the company announced it was looking to sell a further 10% in the company, but a surge of interest saw them reconsider the scale of the stake sale.
Vodafone sold an 18% stake worth $1.8 billion to a variety of buyers, including SBI Mutual Fund, Kotak Securities, and rival telco (and Indus Towers shareholder) Bharti Airtel. Airtel is now the company’s largest stakeholder, owning 49% of the business.
Vi has faced significant challenges in the Indian market, struggling to stay afloat amid intense competition from Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel for many years. Despite securing funding earlier this year, the company continues to steadily lose subscribers to its rivals.
The company lags behind competitors in 4G deployment and has yet to roll out 5G services at scale, unlike Jio and Airtel, both of whom launched 5G in 2022 and millions of users. Cash-strapped Vi is taking a more cautious approach, primarily focusing on expanding its 4G network to cover 90% of India’s population by mid-2025.
In October last year, Vi announced the launch of commercial 5G services by March this year, starting with Delhi and Mumbai, and expanding to other major cities across 17 regions.
This follows recent multi-billion dollar deals with Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung to upgrade 75,000 existing 4G sites over the next three years.
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