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The big news is that MTN has cleared a major hurdle in its planned takeover of IHS Towers. On August 4, 2026, IHS shareholders met to vote on the merger and approved the deal on the first vote. Shareholder approval was one of the conditions MTN needed before the transaction could proceed. The deal would see MTN acquire the roughly 75% of IHS it does not already own, taking its stake to 100%. The transaction is valued at about $2.2 billion (R35.4 billion) for the shares MTN does not already hold.

Why should anyone care about a tower deal? Because these aren’t just metal structures sitting by roadsides. Towers are the physical infrastructure that mobile networks depend on, and MTN is effectively moving to regain control of a huge chunk of infrastructure it previously separated from its business. IHS has nearly 29,000 towers across Africa, serving multiple operators in five key MTN markets. MTN says bringing IHS fully into the group fits its broader three-platform strategy under Ambition 2030, with towers becoming increasingly important as data consumption, digital services and AI infrastructure grow. Financially, MTN’s numbers also suggest why it likes the deal: the acquisition was expected to add about R2.011 billion in pro-forma profit for 2025, while increasing pro-forma EBITDA by 9% to R107.4 billion.

The interesting bit is that MTN and IHS aren’t strangers. In 2022, MTN South Africa sold 5,701 towers to IHS for R6.4 billion, excluding about R4.6 billion in lease liabilities. At the time, this was part of the broader industry shift towards tower companies owning and managing infrastructure while telecom operators focused their capital on running networks and serving customers. The Competition Commission approved that transaction in March 2022 but attached conditions around supplier development, B-BBEE ownership, tower rollout and fair access to sites. IHS subsequently became a major infrastructure partner for MTN, including providing power-management services across thousands of South African sites.

Fast-forward to February 17, 2026, and MTN announced that IHS’s board had accepted its $8.50-per-share offer to acquire the remaining shares. There was an interesting piece of housekeeping behind the move: IHS had been selling its Latin American assets, with disposals announced/completed around February 11 and 17, leaving the remaining business much more closely aligned with MTN’s African footprint. MTN said the transaction would effectively allow it to “buy back” the towers it had previously sold, while also gaining full ownership of IHS’s broader African tower portfolio. The proposed deal was still subject to shareholder and regulatory approvals, so this week’s vote removes one important obstacle but doesn’t necessarily mean the transaction is completely finished.

What’s more, African telecom operators are increasingly treating infrastructure as a strategic asset again. MTN is not simply buying towers; it’s bringing a major infrastructure platform back under its control at a time when connectivity, cloud, data centres and AI are making physical digital infrastructure more valuable. The financial upside is attractive, but there is also a trade-off: MTN’s pro forma net debt-to-EBITDA ratio rises from 0.3x to 0.8x after the transaction. So, while the R2 billion profit contribution makes for a neat headline, the more important question is what owning IHS’s infrastructure will allow MTN to do over the next decade and whether the extra control and cash generation justify taking on the additional financial exposure.

Source: TechPoint