On 17 February 2026, MTN Group announced it had agreed to acquire the approximately 75% stake in IHS Towers that it did not already own, paying $2.2 billion in cash and valuing the entire company at approximately $6.2 billion including debt. The deal was priced at $8.50 per IHS share — a 9.7% premium to the company’s 30-day volume-weighted average price — and is expected to close later in 2026, pending regulatory approvals. When it does, it will be the largest telecoms infrastructure transaction in Africa in recent memory, and a structural reset of how mobile network investment works across the continent.
What MTN Is Actually Buying
IHS Towers is one of the world’s largest independent tower companies, with operations concentrated in Africa. At the end of 2025, IHS operated approximately 28,700 towers across five core markets: Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Zambia, and South Africa. Nigeria dominates the portfolio — the company operates 15,942 towers in-country, accounting for roughly 60% of its total revenue. IHS reported $1.07 billion in revenue from Nigeria alone in 2025, out of total group revenue of approximately $1.58 billion.
The tower estate serves multiple mobile network operators. But one operator has always been the anchor tenant: in the third quarter of 2025, approximately 62% of IHS’s total revenue came from MTN operating companies. Airtel accounted for roughly 15%. The economics of IHS, in other words, are largely the economics of MTN’s lease obligations — and MTN has decided to internalise them.
Why MTN Sold Towers in the First Place — and Why It Is Buying Them Back
IHS Towers was built, in significant part, from assets that MTN sold. The sale-and-leaseback model — selling towers to an independent company and then renting back capacity — became a dominant telecoms infrastructure strategy across Africa and globally in the 2010s. The logic was straightforward: operators freed up capital locked in passive infrastructure, independent tower companies could drive better asset utilisation by hosting multiple tenants, and everyone shared the economics of a higher tenancy ratio.
The model worked well when African currencies were stable relative to the dollar and when operators’ primary cost concern was capital efficiency. It has worked less well as currency depreciation across MTN’s key markets — particularly Nigeria, where the naira lost more than 60% of its value against the dollar in 2023 — has made dollar-denominated tower leases a growing drag on margin. MTN Nigeria’s earnings reports over the past two years have repeatedly flagged lease costs as a structural pressure on profitability.
Buying IHS back converts that ongoing dollar-linked operating expense into a fixed capital cost. The lease payments stop. The towers are an asset on the balance sheet. Cash flow improves. The deal is, at root, a currency and cash flow hedge structured as a $2.2 billion acquisition.
The Infrastructure Dividend: 4G and 5G Without the Negotiation
The strategic logic extends beyond the balance sheet. Direct ownership of 28,700 towers removes a layer of negotiation from MTN’s network rollout decision-making. Every time MTN wants to upgrade a site to support 5G-ready radio access network equipment, add a new antenna configuration, or upgrade power infrastructure to support AI-driven edge compute nodes, it currently has to work through an IHS tenancy agreement. After the acquisition closes, MTN makes those decisions unilaterally.
That operational flexibility matters in a market where 5G rollout timelines are increasingly competitive. MTN has been rolling out 5G infrastructure across South Africa and is beginning trials in Nigeria and Ghana. IHS towers are the physical substrate of that expansion. Owning the infrastructure directly accelerates the decision cycle from months to weeks.
The Uncomfortable Question for Airtel and Other Tenants
Airtel Africa, Vodacom, and other operators who currently co-locate on IHS towers face a structurally changed relationship once the acquisition closes. They will be renting infrastructure from their largest competitor. The concern among rival operators is that a competitor-owned tower company could, over time, favour its own network’s upgrade priorities, adjust commercial terms at renewal, or make co-location decisions that disadvantage rivals.
MTN and IHS have both moved to address this concern directly. IHS has committed to retaining independent governance and continuing to serve all tenants on an arm’s-length commercial basis, with existing tenancy agreements remaining in place. MTN has indicated it intends to run IHS as a commercially independent operation — not folding the tower estate directly into its network operations but maintaining it as a separate entity that continues generating third-party revenue.
Whether those commitments hold up under competitive pressure over a five-to-ten year horizon is the question Airtel’s strategic team is now stress-testing. The tenancy ratio at IHS has already declined — from 1.54 times in 2020 to 1.46 times by late 2025 — suggesting that independent operators have been cautiously diversifying their tower exposure even before the acquisition was announced. That diversification is likely to accelerate.
Nigeria’s Regulatory Scrutiny
The Nigerian government is not treating the deal as a routine M&A transaction. Bosun Tijani, the Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, has said the government will evaluate the acquisition to ensure it aligns with Nigeria’s telecom development objectives and does not undermine competition or consumer protection. The Nigerian Communications Commission, which has joint regulatory jurisdiction over the country’s tower market with the sector regulator, is expected to conduct a formal assessment before the transaction is cleared.
Nigeria is where the stakes are highest. IHS’s 15,942 Nigerian towers represent the single largest concentration of mobile infrastructure in the country, serving all of Nigeria’s major mobile operators. A determination that the transaction creates a competitive harm — or that access conditions for rival operators must be legally ringfenced — could materially alter the structure of the deal or impose ongoing operational conditions on MTN Nigeria’s use of the combined estate.
2,762 Jobs: The Workforce Dimension
Beyond the balance sheet, the transaction carries a significant human dimension. TechCabal reported on 17 March 2026 that MTN Nigeria will absorb 2,762 IHS Nigeria employees as part of the deal — bringing the full tower operations workforce in-house alongside the physical infrastructure. For MTN Nigeria, that means taking on not just 15,942 towers but the engineers, site managers, and field technicians required to run them, a workforce integration challenge that will define the operational success of the acquisition as much as the financial engineering does.
The Larger Signal: Infrastructure Ownership Is Back
The MTN-IHS transaction is the most visible expression of a broader shift in how African telecoms operators think about passive infrastructure. The decade of outsourcing has collided with currency volatility, competitive urgency around 5G, and the operational friction of managing network upgrades through a third-party landlord. The pendulum is swinging back toward ownership.
For Africa’s mobile infrastructure market — estimated at $4 billion and growing — the deal resets the model. Independent tower companies that built their business case on operator willingness to lease rather than own now face a strategic question about what their value proposition looks like in a market where the anchor tenant becomes the owner. That question will not be answered only by MTN. But MTN’s $2.2 billion answer is the loudest signal the market has received in years.
— Technology Desk, BETAR.africa
