Maxis and Reddys buy out Aircel

Posted on | December 31, 2005 |

Malaysia’s largest telecom company Maxis Communications, in partnership with Apollo Hospitals promoter Reddys, will buy Aircel for $1.08 billion. Maxis plans to list Aircel.

Maxis will take a direct 65% stake in Aircel by spending $702m. It will hold the remaining stake indirectly through a joint venture, owned 74% by Apollo and 26% by Maxis.

This implies an enterprise valuation of $800m for Aircel. With Aircel’s mobile subscriber base of over 2.2m, the payment per subscriber will be around $364. Vodafone paid $1,000 per subscriber for Bharti while $570 a subscriber was paid by Hutchison Essar for BPL.

Mr Sivasankaran’s Sterling Infotech has been lucky in its fourth attempt to sell Aircel. It had earlier held discussions with Idea Cellular, AFK Sistema of Russia and Hutch.

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