SINGAPORE (July 1): Singapore Telecommunications (Singtel) announced that its associate Bharti Airtel has sold a 25% stake in its data centre arm, Nxtra Data Limited, for US$235 million ($327.4 million).
The agreement was made between the Indian integrated telecommunications operator and Comfort Investments II on Wednesday.
Comfort Investments II is an affiliated entity of CAP V Mauritius Limited. Cap V Mauritius Limited is an investment fund managed and advised by affiliated entities of NASDAQ-listed The Carlyle Group.
Following the completion of the transaction, Carlyle will hold a 25% stake in the business.
The post-money enterprise valuation of Nxtra is approximately US$1.2 billion.
Nxtra says it will use the proceeds from this transaction to continue scaling up its infrastructure and offerings across India.
Nxtra, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Airtel, has a nation-wide portfolio of 10 large data centres and over 120 edge data centres that provides secure data centre services to leading Indian and global enterprises, hyperscalers, start-ups, small-medium enterprises (SMEs), and governments.
These services include co-location services, cloud infrastructure, managed hosting, data backup, disaster recovery, and remote infrastructure management.
Nxtra says it is building multiple large data centres across India to capture the considerable surge in demand for secure data centres. This comes as businesses undertake digital transformation and consumer demand for digital services continues to increase.
“At Airtel, we have built a robust data centre portfolio that is future ready and scalable. For us, the security and data privacy requirements of our customers are our top priorities, which we have established as a key differentiator for our data centre offerings,” says Gopal Vittal, managing director and CEO at Bharti Airtel.
“Rapid digitization has opened up a massive growth opportunity for data centres in India and we plan to accelerate our investments to become a major player in this segment. We are delighted to have Carlyle as a strategic partner in this exciting journey, particularly given their experience in this industry, and look forward to working with them,” he adds.
“India is set to become one of the largest markets in the world for digital services. Airtel, with its proven track record of solid execution and customer focus, is well positioned to leverage the potential growth of data centres in India,” says Neeraj Bharadwaj, managing director of the Carlyle Asia Partners advisory team.
Shares in Singtel closed flat at $2.46 on Tuesday.
