Jio completes first $285m tranche of buying RCom wireless business
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Jio completes first $285m tranche of buying RCom wireless business

Reliance Jio.jpg

Indian 4G mobile operator Reliance Jio has completed the first stage in its acquisition of the consumer wireless business of rival company Reliance Communications (RCom).

It has bought 248 media convergence nodes and “related infrastructure assets” for 20 billion rupees ($285.4 million).

This is just 11% of the whole asset sale that RCom is hoping to complete by next week – also involving its towers, fibre network and mobile spectrum as well as the nodes. The total transaction is expected to be worth 181 billion rupees ($2.58 billion).

Reliance Jio will buy most of the assets, but Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management will buy a small amount of real estate under the terms of the agreement by all three parties in May 2018.

The nodes, whose sale was completed this morning, cover “over five million square feet” (460,000 square metres), RCom said in a statement.

The RCom statement did not refer to the other assets due to be transferred, but sources in RCom have told Capacity that they believe the rest of the deal will be completed next week.

That will leave RCom with Global Cloud Xchange (GCX) – its international subsea cable operation – and its data centre and enterprise telecoms business in India. They represent about 10% of the previous value of RCom, which is reviewing two bids each worth $1.1 billion for the combination of the three businesses. One of the bids is from I Squared Capital (ISQ), which bought HGC Global Communications for $1.9 billion from CK Hutchison in 2017.

 

 

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