The Carlyle Group will acquire around 25 percent stake in Airtel’s data center business ‘Nxtra’ for $235 million.
The post-money enterprise valuation of Nxtra is around $1.2 billion and Carlyle will hold a stake of approximately 25 percent in the business upon completion of the transaction, with Airtel continuing to hold the remaining stake of around 75 percent, Airtel said in a statement.
“Bharti Airtel and Comfort Investments II, an affiliated entity of CAP V Mauritius Limited, an investment fund managed and advised by affiliated entities of The Carlyle Group today announced an agreement under which Comfort Investments II will invest $235 million in Nxtra Data Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Airtel engaged in the data center business,” it said.
The transaction is subject to the necessary regulatory approvals, including approval from the Competition Commission of India.
Headquartered in New Delhi, Nxtra from Airtel offers secure data center services to leading Indian and global enterprises, hyperscalers, start-ups, SMEs, and governments.
Nxtra’s nation-wide portfolio of 10 large data centers and more than 120 edge data centers provide customers with co-location services, cloud infrastructure, managed hosting, data backup, disaster recovery, and remote infrastructure management.
Extra is building multiple large data centers across the country to capture the significant growth opportunities in India. Last year, the Company commissioned a state of the art datacenter in Pune and is building more across Chennai, Mumbai, and Kolkata. Extra will use the proceeds from this transaction to continue scaling up its infrastructure and offerings across the country.
Gopal Vittal, MD & CEO (India and South Asia), Bharti Airtel, commented: “At Airtel, we have built a robust data center 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 center offerings.”
He added that rapid digitization has opened up a massive growth opportunity for data centers 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,” Vittal added.
Neeraj Bharadwaj, Managing Director of the Carlyle Asia Partners advisory team, commented: “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 centers in India. We look forward to collaborating with Airtel to unlock the full potential of Extra.”
