Airtel sells Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone to Orange for around $900 million

Orange is continuing its acquisition drive in Africa and has agreed to acquire Bharti Airtel’s operations in Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone.

In March 2015, Airtel and Orange struck a deal in Africa to allow Orange customers in Côte d’Ivoire to send money to customers of Airtel Money in Burkina Faso, and vice versa, owing to the interconnection between the two operators’ mobile money platforms. Airtel had in July previous year entered into an agreement with Orange to sell four subsidiaries, but could finalise a deal for only two.

Orange reported sales of 39 billion euros in 2014.

The announcement comes six months after the two companies announced they were in talks on the sale of Bharti’s operations in these two countries, besides Chad and Congo Brazzaville. Investors initially gave a thumbs up to the deal, with the Airtel stock rising 2.3% in intra-day trade on Wednesday on expectations of reduction in debt, which has been weighing on consolidated financials, and also on the fact that the valuations are higher than what the market estimated.

Orange began negotiations with Bharti Airtel as far back as July and was originally in discussions about acquiring businesses in Chad and Congo Brazzaville as well.

“The agreements regarding potential transactions in the remaining two countries have lapsed”, Bharti said in a statement. The deal was signed by Bharti Aritel’s Netherlands subsidiary and Orange.

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The deal, still subject to regulatory approval, will add 5.5 million mobile phone customers to Orange’s portfolio, it said.

“Orange is already present in surrounding countries, so there would be non-negligible cross-border synergies”, said Zibi during a previous conversation with Light Reading. It has been selling its telecom towers in many markets to raise funds to pare debt.