Idea Cellular Gets Approval for Tower Separation

India's Idea Cellular has received approval from its shareholders to split off its tower assets into a separate company, Idea Cellular Towers Infrastructure. The new company, which will manage Idea's 11,000 towers will now be merged with Indus Towers, the three-way joint venture with Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Essar.

The three-way venture was originally announced in July 2007.

Vodafone Essar and Bharti will own approximately 42% each and Idea will own the remaining 16% stake in Indus Towers. New passive infrastructure rollout in the 16 circles will be undertaken by Indus Towers.

Indus Towers will have approximately 70,000 sites at inception providing it with significant scale benefits, and will undertake a significant rollout of telecom infrastructure to propel the mobile sector towards achieving India's teledensity and rural coverage goals within the next few years.

In related news, rival operator BSNL has cancelled its own plans to hive off its tower assets into a separate company.

Posted to the site on 10th July 2009