By Financescape
Airtel Africa, a leading provider of telecommunications and mobile money services, today announced that the company has successfully signed a new $500m loan facility with a group of relationship banks. The committed facility consists of a combination of a revolving credit facility and term loans with tenor of up to 4 years.
The company further declared that The facility would be used to partially refinance the Group’s 750m Euro-denominated bond (c.$880m) due on 20th May 2021 adding that the balance of the Euro-denominated bond will be repaid with existing Group cash to reduce gross debt and associated interest costs.
Airtel Africa noted that the new loan will further strengthen the core liquidity of the Group and also has prepayment flexibilities that would allow the Group to optimize the efficiency of its capital structure with the free cash flows and cash receipts anticipated over the next 12 months following its recent announcements related to tower sales and mobile money minority investments.
Banks that participated in the facility include a diverse group of existing global relationship banks, Bank of America, BNP Paribas, Citibank, HSBC, J.P. Morgan, Standard Chartered Bank, and two Indian relationship banks, Axis Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank.
