MTN Group has cleared a major hurdle in its plan to take full control of IHS Holding Limited. Shareholders of the telecommunications tower company voted in favour of the deal. The approval came at an Extraordinary General Meeting held in London on August 4, 2026.
More than two thirds of voting shareholders backed the transaction. This met the threshold required for the special resolution to pass. As a result, MTN can now move forward with a deal first announced in February 2026.
Under the agreement, MTN will acquire the roughly 75 percent of IHS it does not already own. MTN currently holds about 24.7 percent of the tower company. The offer values IHS shares at $8.50 each in cash. That puts the transaction at an enterprise value of around $6.2 billion, with an equity consideration of about $2.2 billion for the outstanding shares.
The deal has a specific structure. MTN set up a temporary entity called Sub-Merger Co just for this transaction. Sub-Merger Co will merge into IHS and then cease to exist. IHS will remain the surviving legal entity, but it will become a wholly owned subsidiary of MTN once the deal closes.
Once completed, IHS will also be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. This will end its years as a publicly traded firm. However, its existing corporate registration, contracts, licences and permits will stay intact, unless MTN later decides to restructure the business.
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Ralph Mupita, MTN Group’s President and Chief Executive Officer, called the shareholder approval an important milestone. He said telecom towers remain central to MTN’s Ambition 2030 strategy. According to Mupita, owning IHS outright will strengthen the group’s financial and strategic position, especially as demand for digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence keeps growing across Africa.
There was also a backup plan in place. A second resolution would have allowed the meeting to be postponed if support fell short. But this was not needed, since shareholders approved the main deal comfortably. Notably, long-term IHS investor Wendel had already signalled its support before the vote, giving MTN a strong base of backing from the start.
Even so, the transaction is not yet finalised. MTN has confirmed that regulatory approvals across relevant markets are still outstanding. The deal will only close once those approvals come through. So far, the company has not given a firm timeline for when that might happen.
If completed, this acquisition would mark a major shift in African telecom strategy. For much of the past decade, mobile operators sold off their tower assets to independent infrastructure firms. They then leased those towers back, mainly to cut costs and free up capital. MTN’s move to buy back full ownership of IHS reverses that trend.
This gives MTN direct control over towers that support 4G, 5G and fibre linked services across several African markets. IHS Towers, for its part, has spent years positioning itself as an independent infrastructure provider. It serves multiple telecom operators across Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.
MTN has long been one of its biggest customers and shareholders. In fact, the company has relied heavily on IHS sites to expand its network reach over the years. So, bringing that infrastructure fully in house is expected to lower long term leasing costs. It should also give MTN greater control over the pace of its network investments.
With shareholder approval now secured, attention shifts to the regulators. They still need to sign off on the deal before it can close. Analysts expect the coming months to determine how quickly MTN can complete what would be one of the largest infrastructure acquisitions in Africa’s telecom sector, according to TechCabal.
