Carlyle All Set to Acquire Nearly 25 Percent Stake in Airtel's Data Centre Business

Bharti Airtel (NSE: BHARTIARTL), the integrated telecommunications operator, and Comfort Investments II, an affiliated entity of CAP V Mauritius Limited, an investment fund managed and advised by affiliated entities of The Carlyle Group (NASDAQ: CG) have entered into an agreement to invest in Nxtra Data Limited. Comfort Investments II will invest $235 million in Nxtra, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Airtel engaged in the data centre business. The post-money enterprise valuation of Nxtra is around $1.2 billion, and the company will use the proceedings to continue scaling up its infrastructure and offerings across the country.

Gopal Vittal, MD & CEO, India and South Asia, Bharti Airtel, comments, “At Airtel, we have built a robust data centre portfolio that is future ready and scalable. For us, the security and data privacy requirements of our customers are our top priorities, which we have established as a key differentiator for our data centre offerings. Rapid digitization has opened up a massive growth opportunity for data centres in India and we plan to accelerate our investments to become a major player in this segment. We are delighted to have Carlyle as a strategic partner in this exciting journey, particularly given their experience in this industry, and look forward to working with them.”

Carlyle will hold a stake of nearly 25 percent in the business once the transaction is complete and Airtel will continue to hold the remaining stock. The transaction is subject to the necessary regulatory approvals, including approval from the Competition Commission of India.

Airtel is a high quality partner in India with whom Carlyle executives have built a strong and constructive relationship with over many years.

Neeraj Bharadwaj, Managing Director of the Carlyle Asia Partners Advisory Team, says, “India is set to become one of the largest markets in the world for digital services. Airtel, with its proven track record of solid execution and customer focus, is well positioned to leverage the potential growth of data centres in India. We look forward to collaborating with Airtel to unlock the full potential of Nxtra.”

Greg Zeluck, Co-Head, Carlyle Asia Partners advisory team, adds “Airtel is a high quality partner in India with whom Carlyle executives have built a strong and constructive relationship with over many years. We are delighted to be collaborating on this together, and believe Airtel’s nation-wide network and strong governance coupled with Carlyle’s data centre experience and operational capabilities creates a compelling partnership that will help Nxtra to capture growing demand as data usage continues to surge.”

New Delhi-based Nxtra has a nation-wide portfolio of 10 large data centres and more than 120 edge data centres to provide customers with co-location services, cloud infrastructure, managed hosting, data backup, disaster recovery and remote infrastructure management. The company is also building multiple large data centres PAN India to capture the significant growth opportunities that India is witnessing currently. Last year, Nxtra commissioned a state-of-the-art data centre in Pune and is now expanding in Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata.