BY BUSINESS REPORTER AND AGENCIES
THE Tanzanian subsidiary of mobile phone mast company Helios Towers Africa has received an $85 million syndicated loan for the expansion and improvement of its network in Tanzania.
"We are spending the money towards building new towers and upgrading existing towers," chief financial officer Andres de Orleans Borbon told Reuters.
A significant portion of the funds, which Standard Bank helped arrange, will be used to make existing sites more fuel efficient, and the rest will go towards building new towers, 150 of which are in progress.
Helios Towers Africa buys or builds the towers used by mobile operators and then rents them back to the companies. It has more than 2,600 in Ghana, Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania, and another 850 in an affiliate Nigerian company.
It bought 1,020 towers from Millicom in Tanzania, east Africa's most populous nation in 2010. Tanzania had more than 21 million mobile subscribers as of September, or about 46 percent penetration.
De Orleans Borbon said HTA's operations were fully financed and the company still had significant equity resources that it had yet to deploy.
"We have a pipeline of opportunities that we are working on," he said, declining to elaborate.
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