MCB Equity Fund invests Rs1.5billion in Africa Mobile Networks

MCB Equity Fund, the private equity arm of the MCB Group has announced the acquisition of a minority stake in Africa Mobile Networks Ltd (AMN) for USD36million (Rs1.5billion) as part of a consortium led by Metier, an independent African private equity manager.

As part of the transaction, the consortium is also acquiring USD 3.5 million of existing shares and in total will own a significant minority shareholding in AMN.

AMN builds and operates mobile network base stations in partnership with tier-1 licensed mobile network operators such as MTN, Orange and Vodafone to extend their rural coverage.

AMN provides a full turnkey NaaS (“Network as a Service”) approach to enable mobile network operators in Sub-Saharan Africa to expand their coverage deep into rural areas with no capital expenditure or operating equipment risk borne by the mobile operators in these remote locations.

It currently operates circa 2,000 mobile network base stations in rural towns and villages across 10 countries, serving around 7 million people who were previously unconnected and processing 1.2 billion phone calls per annum.