News
The acquisition will add just under 1,000 towers to edotco’s portfolio, many of which are in strategic locations throughout Malaysia
Today, edotco, a 63%-owned subsidiary of Axiata Group, has announced that it will purchase rival Malaysian tower operator Touch Mindscape for around $400 million.
Touch Mindscape’s primary assets include 923 telecommunication towers and optical fiber network including backbone trunks and last mile connections, many of which are located in strategically important areas throughout Malaysia.
“This opportunity expands edotco’s existing presence by significantly scaling up our tower portfolio in the three States of Pahang, Negeri Sembilan and Melaka with very limited overlap. The towers in these States come at very high co-location ratios of 3x (Melaka), 3.6x (Negeri Sembilan), and 2.4x (Pahang),” said edotco managing director Wan Zainal Adileen.
“The Touch Mindscape tower portfolio also includes towers in key strategic locations of Kuala Lumpur, Putrajaya, Perak and Kedah. More importantly, this proposed acquisition enhances edotco’s capability and capacity to support the wider provision and improvement of connectivity to the public for the development of the socio-economy of Malaysia.”
According to edotco itself, this acquisition will be a major step in their ambition to be one of the top five tower companies in the world. The company currently owns and manages around 43,000 towers across Malaysia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Myanmar, Philippines and Laos.
In Malaysia itself, edotco is already the largest independent tower company, with the acquisition further strengthening their market lead.
“The transaction enables edotco to increase its tower market share from approximately 21% to 25%,” said the company in a statement.
In related news, Axiata Group also recently announced that it has committed to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. As part of the announcement, the company said it was committed to the Science Based Targets initiative’s (SBTi) Business Ambition for 1.5 degrees C campaign, further informing the company’s Net-Zero Carbon Roadmap, which is expected to be implemented from Q1 2022.
“Unless we proactively take steps to improve our energy efficiency, use more renewable energy and reduce the carbon intensity of our operations while contributing to regional digital telco green innovation, our network growth to support higher data consumption would only put more strain on the environment,” said Axiata Group CEO Izzaddin Idris.
Want to keep up to date with the latest developments in the world of telecoms? Subscriber to receive Total Telecom’s daily newsletter here
Also in the news:
ETNO: It’s time big tech helped pay for networks
Telefonica bringing industrial 5G services to market in 2022
Does Reliance Jio want a slice of BT?
