IHS Holding, an African infrastructure and co-location holding company is set to go public today, on the New York Stock Exchange.
The company said on the heels of the NYSE outing that its initial public offering was priced at $21 a share, at the bottom of the expected range of between $21 and $24 a share.
The company raised $378.0 million as it sold 18.0 million shares in the IPO. The company had previously said selling shareholders were planning to sell 4.5 million shares in the IPO, but that wasn’t part of the pricing announcement.
With 328.05 million shares expected to be outstanding after the IPO, the pricing values the company at about $6.9 billion.
The stock is expected to begin trading on the NYSE sometime after the open under the ticker symbol “IHS.” Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Citigroup were the lead underwriters.
The company recorded a net income of $76.6 million on revenue of $763.6 million during the six months ended June 30, after a loss of $352.9 million on revenue of $664.1 million in the same period year ago. The company is going public on a day that the Renaissance IPO ETF IPO, +1.87% was climbing on 1.1% in premarket trading, while futures ES00, 0.90% for the S&P 500 SPX, 1.02% were rallying 0.9%, according to media reports.
IHS Towers’ owners include AIIM, ECP, FMO, GIC, Goldman Sachs, IFC, Investec, KIC, MTN Group and Wendel.
Wendel currently owns 62,975,396 shares of IHS Holding Limited (in addition to the 12,374,657 shares managed by Wendel for third parties) and will not sell any shares in the offering.
South Africa’s MTN is the biggest of such shareholders, owning 29% of IHS, alongside the likes of Goldman Sachs.
IHS Towers began in 2001 as a tower builder in Nigeria.
In the years that followed, the company began maintaining towers for MNOs too before eventually beginning to offer co-location services in 2009. The company completed its first major tower deal in 2010 with the acquisition of 800 Visafone sites, and then gained significant scale in Nigeria with a c. 9,000 site tower deal with MTN (with IHS and MTN creating a joint venture into which the assets were placed) and two deals with Etisalat (acquiring 2,136 towers followed by a 555-tower deal).
