MTN Group: New landlord, same old tenant as $2.2 billion IHS Towers Nigeria acquisition clears regulatory hurdle
MTN Group has cleared one of the biggest obstacles standing between it and full control of Nigeria’s largest tower infrastructure company, marking a striking reversal for Africa’s largest telecom operator after years of selling off the very assets it is now racing to reclaim. Nigeria’s Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission has granted conditional approval for MTN to acquire the remaining stake in IHS Towers Nigeria, a deal valued at roughly $2.2 billion, though regulators attached a condition designed to keep the telecom giant from gaining outright dominance over infrastructure its own competitors depend on.
Under the terms of the approval, MTN must sell up to 30 percent of its stake in IHS Nigeria to local investors over time, at market prices, even as it proceeds with buying the remaining 19.2 percent stake it agreed to acquire back in February. IHS Nigeria operates close to 16,000 towers that don’t just carry MTN’s network traffic, they also support Airtel and T2 Mobile, the rebranded successor to 9mobile. That shared dependency is exactly what worried Nigerian regulators, who have been trying to strike a balance between letting MTN consolidate ownership of critical infrastructure and preventing that consolidation from giving MTN leverage over rivals who rely on the same towers to reach their customers.
The FCCPC’s reasoning reflects a broader tension that has followed the telecom tower business across emerging markets for years. Towers are, in a very literal sense, shared infrastructure, physical real estate that multiple competing operators lease space on to mount antennas and equipment. When an independent tower company like IHS owns and operates that infrastructure, it has every commercial incentive to serve all tenants fairly, since its revenue depends on leasing capacity to as many operators as possible. But when one of the tenants, in this case MTN, becomes the majority owner of the landlord, the incentive structure shifts. MTN gains more control over network expansion, cost structures, and capacity planning for its own operations, but it also gains the ability, at least in theory, to make life more difficult or more expensive for the rival carriers leasing space on towers MTN now effectively controls. The FCCPC’s local ownership requirement is meant to dilute that risk somewhat, ensuring Nigerian investors retain a meaningful stake in infrastructure that underpins the country’s entire mobile network.
For MTN, the approval represents genuine strategic value even with the ownership cap attached. Owning the majority of IHS Nigeria means MTN can better control the pace and cost of network densification as it expands mobile broadband and 5G coverage, both of which depend heavily on adding new tower sites in increasingly competitive urban markets. The deal also gives MTN a path to recover some of the capital it has tied up in the acquisition and ease pressure on its balance sheet, since owning towers outright, rather than leasing space on them, changes how those costs and revenues flow through the company’s books over time.
What makes this deal particularly notable is how directly it contradicts the strategy MTN pursued for the better part of a decade. Under a program the company called its Asset Realisation Programme, launched under former CEO Rob Shuter in 2019, MTN systematically sold off tower portfolios across multiple African markets in sale-and-leaseback arrangements, a financing technique that let the company convert physical infrastructure into immediate cash while continuing to use the same towers as a paying tenant. The most prominent example came in South Africa, where MTN sold 5,701 towers to IHS Towers in a deal worth roughly R6.4 billion, completed in 2022, alongside a power management services agreement covering roughly 13,000 sites. That deal was explicitly framed as a balance sheet strengthening move, unlocking capital that MTN could redirect toward other priorities rather than tying it up in physical infrastructure ownership.
Now, under current CEO Ralph Mupita, MTN is reversing course dramatically, buying back the same category of assets it once sold in order to internalize the profit margins it has been paying IHS as a tenant. Mupita described the IHS Nigeria acquisition as a pivotal step in securing the digital infrastructure Africa’s continued growth will require, a framing that positions the reversal not as an admission that the earlier asset sales were a mistake, but as a natural next phase once the company’s balance sheet had recovered enough to support reinvestment in owned infrastructure. Regionally, the shift is significant. With close to 29,000 high-quality towers set to return to MTN’s direct control across its footprint once the broader IHS transaction closes, the company gains not just cost predictability but a new revenue stream, since it will now collect rent from third-party operators leasing space on towers it owns rather than paying rent to IHS itself.
The move also carries implications beyond MTN’s own operations. Safaricom, the dominant carrier in Kenya, has long avoided the sale-and-leaseback model that spread across West and South Africa, preferring to retain direct ownership of its tower network rather than monetizing it through third-party towercos. MTN’s reversal, buying back the very assets it once sold to raise capital, arguably validates that more conservative approach, suggesting that infrastructure ownership carries strategic value that can outweigh the short-term balance sheet benefits of divestment, particularly as operators across the continent race to densify networks for 5G and prepare for the kind of edge computing demands that next-generation mobile networks are expected to require.
The broader IHS Towers deal still requires final regulatory sign-off in additional jurisdictions beyond Nigeria, and MTN shareholders have already given their approval for the roughly $6.2 billion transaction covering IHS’s wider portfolio. But the Nigerian approval, with its built-in local ownership requirement, offers an early template for how regulators across the continent may handle similar consolidation attempts going forward: allow the deal, but insist on enough local participation and competitive safeguards to keep shared infrastructure from becoming a tool one operator can use against its rivals. For MTN, the message is clear enough. It gets to become the landlord again, but not without keeping a close eye from the very tenants, and the regulators, watching to make sure it plays fair.
