IN SHORT: MTN Group agreed on February 17 to buy back IHS Towers in a $6.2 billion all-cash deal, paying $8.50 per share and taking the company from NYSE to full private MTN ownership. The deal is the largest digital infrastructure transaction in African history and reverses a decade of tower divestment strategy across the continent. Completion is expected in 2026, subject to regulatory approvals including Nigeria’s NCC and competition commission.
MTN Group has agreed to acquire the roughly 75% of IHS Towers it did not already own in a $6.2 billion all-cash deal, reuniting Africa’s largest mobile operator with Africa’s largest tower company and reversing the asset-light infrastructure model that dominated African telecoms for the past decade.
The offer of $8.50 per IHS share represents a 239% premium over the company’s share price when it announced a strategic review in March 2024, and a 36% premium over the 52-week volume-weighted average price as of February 4, 2026.
- MTN held approximately 24.7% of IHS going into the deal. It will fund the remaining acquisition through approximately $1.1 billion in MTN cash plus roughly $1.1 billion from IHS’s own balance sheet, with no new MTN equity issuance required. IHS must hold at least $355 million in cash at closing.
- IHS will delist from the New York Stock Exchange upon completion, ending its tenure as one of Africa’s few independent tower companies listed on a major international exchange. The company was valued at its peak as one of the world’s largest independent tower operators with approximately 29,000 towers across Africa.
- The transaction followed IHS’s disposals of its Latin American tower business and its fibre operations in February 2026, refocusing the company purely on its African asset base before the merger closes. J.P. Morgan advised IHS; Bank of America and Citigroup advised MTN.
- The strategic rationale is a direct reversal of the tower divestment wave that swept African telecoms from 2012 to 2022. MTN, like most African operators, sold tower assets to unlock balance sheet capital. Now, with data demand surging and digital infrastructure viewed as strategically critical, MTN is reintegrating those assets to internalise the tower lease margins it had been paying to IHS, capture third-party revenue growth, and improve long-term cost predictability.
- Regulatory review is the critical path. In Nigeria alone, both the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission and the Nigerian Communications Commission have jurisdiction. The Nigerian Minister of Communications signalled a thorough assessment would follow given the telecom sector’s importance to national security and economic development. Completion is expected before end-2026.
- IHS operated approximately 40,000 towers at its peak across 11 countries, with its African portfolio concentrated in five key MTN markets. At closing, MTN will operate the largest integrated tower platform in Africa, combining mobile network tenancy with direct infrastructure ownership.
MTN Group President and CEO Ralph Mupita described the deal as giving the group "a unique opportunity to buy back our towers and strengthen our ability to be partners for progress to the nation states in which we operate."
The Bigger Picture: The MTN-IHS deal is a bet that digital infrastructure in Africa will become the defining strategic asset of the next decade. When operators divested towers in the 2010s, the logic was capital efficiency. The new logic is control: controlling infrastructure means controlling costs, data, and the terms of the connectivity economy as it scales. At $6.2 billion, this is the largest single private capital transaction in African digital history. It will set the tone for how African telecoms think about infrastructure ownership for the next generation.
Source: Bloomberg / BusinessDay NG / TechCabal
