What do you see the impact of Carlyle group taking a stake in the data arm of Bharti Airtel?

Carlyle Group will invest $235 million or Rs.1770 crore to pick up a 25% stake in Nxtra Data Ltd. Nxtra Data is an arm of Bharti Airtel and specializes in the data centre business. This assigns an enterprise valuation of $1.2 billion to Nxtra. Airtel will continue to hold the remaining 75% stake in Nxtra Data. The deal is subject to the regulatory approvals.

For Bharti, it is another means to unlock value in its subsidiaries and use the monetization to build a war chest to take on competition from Reliance Jio and Jio Platforms. Bharti commenced the process with the sale of tower assets and now it is selling the data centres to capitalize on the digital push. Fibre assets are expected to be next on the block.

Nxtra is based out of Delhi and currently offers secure data centre services to leading Indian and global companies. It also services SMEs and start-ups. Nxtra has a pan-India footprint with a portfolio of 10 large data centres and more than 120 edge data centres providing co-location services, cloud infrastructure, managed hosting, disaster recovery etc.

For Carlyle, India has always been the big market where it has missed out the technology and digital opportunity and this deal fills that gap. Carlyle believes that India is all set to become the largest markets for digital services globally and has chosen to go with the Airtel Group Company considering its track record of solid execution and customer focus.