Bharti Airtel has confirmed in a Bombay Stock Exchange filing that it has transferred 100% of shares in mobile operator AirtelTigo to the government of Ghana.
The transaction closes the Ghanaian state’s takeover of the operator. CommsUpdate reports that in April this year, the government signed a definitive acquisition agreement with AirtelTigo’s parent firms Bharti Airtel and Millicom to acquire 100% of the operator’s agreed liabilities, assets and customers.
While the companies have not disclosed any financial details of the acquisition, earlier this year Ghana’s Minister for Communications and Digitalisation Ursula Owusu-Ekuful claimed in a social media post that the Ghanaian state had spent just US$1 to purchase AirtelTigo.
AirtelTigo was created in October 2017 through a merger of Bharti Airtel and Millicom’s Ghanaian operations, and at the time of its establishment it was the second largest player in the market. It has since been overtaken by Vodafone Ghana. The country’s National Communications Authority (NCA) recorded AirtelTigo as having a market share of 19.1% at the end of June 2021, with 7.98 million mobile subscribers.
