Telecom giant, Airtel Africa, will be listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange on Friday, July 5, at the price of N363 per share.
The secondary listing will mark the conclusion of a price discovery through a book building process that ended on June 28, 2019. Further price discovery is expected to continue on the floor of the Exchange, the NSE said at a pre-listing media briefing in Lagos Thursday.
The listing will add about N1.36tn (about $4.44b) to the market cap. This will make Airtel the third-most capitalised company on the NSE, after Dangote Cement (N3.042trn) and MTN Nigeria (N2.626trn). MTN listed on the NSE in May this year by introduction.
Airtel Africa operates in 14 African countries. In Nigeria it has 45.433 million subscribers, making it the third-biggest telecom operator in the country, after MTN with 64.73 million subscribers, and Globacom, with 46.38million, according to figures on the website of the Nigerian Communications Commission, which regulates the industry.
The company will be marked below Listing Requirements to allow it time to increase its number of Nigerian shareholders to at least 300. Its free float is 25 percent, which is reasonably above 10 percent which the NSE requires for cross-border listing.
It was granted a waiver on cross-border listing, because it had done primary listing on the London Stock Exchange.
Iheanyi Nwachukwu
