Reliance Jio Shows Interest in RCom’s Towers and Fiber Assets: Report

Reliance Jio, the Mukesh Ambani-led 4G telco is reportedly planning to buy Anil Ambani-led Reliance Communications’ tower unit and Indian fiber assets. Besides Jio, a number of companies, including Indus Towers, ATC, Bharti Infratel, Brookfield Infrastructure, Sistema JSFC, Tillman Global Holdings, TPG Capital, Carlyle Group, I-Squared Capital and Gateway Partners have shown interest to buy RCom’s tower unit, various media outlets reported.

• Make Telecom Talk My Trusted Source
• 
• 

RCom on Tuesday has also informed the Bombay Stock Exchange that it was renegotiating the tower deal with Brookfield Infrastructure Group and other interested parties.

All of these 11 bidders have submitted expressions of interest (EoIs) to buy 100% stake in RCom’s tower unit, Reliance Infratel.

The development follows Brookfield Infrastructure’s move to call off its agreement with RCom to buy the telco’s tower unit, which has a 42,600-strong towers portfolio and domestic fiber assets. The deal was pegged at Rs 11,000 crore, and the reason behind the deal is RCom’s lapsed merger deal with Aircel last month. The asset management firm is now renegotiating the deal.

The primary reason behind RCom’s deal with Brookfield is to reduce the debt. RCom currently has a debt of Rs. 45,000 crore and it looked to reduce the debt by almost 60% with the deals from Aircel and Brookfield. However, both the deals have now cancelled, and RCom itself will function as an MVNO operator.

RCom’s domestic fibre assets are valued at roughly Rs 4,000 crore, its executive director, Punit Garg said recently. The telco has around 1.78 lakh route kms of domestic fibre assets.