Telecom infrastructure company Helios Towers plans to acquire additional mobile-phone tower sites in South Africa from Eagle Towers, Bloomberg reported. The company first entered South Africa in 2019 through a partnership with Vulatel that brought the group 500 sites. It will add another 65 with this deal, which it expects to be concluded by the second half of the year, CEO Kash Pandya said.
Helios also received an order from the country’s largest mobile operator Vodacom to build towers over the next fifteen months. Vodacom recently announced that it would start rolling out 5G services in South Africa’s three largest cities.
Helios is working on a number of deals that will come through during the next month or two, said Pandya, and expects acquisitions to be concluded by end of the year depending on the impact of the global coronavirus. Helios is in talks with lenders and development-finance institutions about raising debt for large deals if needed later in the year, CEO Tom Greenwood said on the same call.
