A raft of investors including Switzerland-based Partners Group AG and Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management Inc have signed non-disclosure agreements (NDA) to potentially invest in internet services provider Excitel Broadband Pvt Ltd, in a $200 million equity deal, said two people aware of the development.
The effort to raise growth funding has seen 15 prospective buyers, also including Macquarie Group, Apax Partners and Actis Llp, sign NDAs for the equity-raising process being run by Avendus Capital. The next stage will involve submitting non-binding offers (NBOs), following which the shortlisted bidders will be taken to the next stage for submitting a binding offer.
“The process has been recently launched. There is a lot of interest in the fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) provider,” said one of the two people cited above requesting anonymity.
Set up in 2015, Excitel has a 1 million subscribers across 55 cities, including Hyderabad, New Delhi, Bangalore, Khammam, Vijayawada, Lucknow, and Kanpur.
Investors looking to pick equity in Excitel mirrors growing interest in FTTH as India’s $3-billion wired internet market is expected to grow exponentially. According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), the nation has 941.47 million broadband users, with wireline subscribers accounting for 44.66 million.
Spokespersons for Partners Group, Actis, Apax Partners, and Macquarie declined comment. Vivek Raina, chief executive officer and co-founder of Excitel Broadband, also declined comment.
“We do not comment on stories of this nature as per policy,” an Avendus Capital spokesperson said in an emailed response.
Queries emailed to the spokesperson of Brookfield on Tuesday remained unanswered till press time.
Excitel and rivals
Reliance Jio Ltd, Bharti Airtel Ltd, Excitel, Hathway Cable & Datacom Ltd, and Alliance Broadband Services Pvt are prominent players by user experience in top Indian cities, according to a January report by mobile network analytics firm Opensignal.
Airtel leads in Ahmedabad and Mumbai for speed, while Hathway dominates in Bengaluru and shares Chennai’s top spot with ACT, the report said. Excitel stands out in Delhi and Hyderabad for both download and upload speeds, it said.
In Delhi, Excitel offers its users an average download speed of 77.2Mbps, a lead of 25Mbps (50.4%) over Airtel and 33.9Mbps (78.1%) over Jio, the report said. Likewise, Excitel leads with average broadband upload speed of 54.7Mbps, about 15.9Mbps (41.1%) better than second-placed Airtel.
Excitel boasts of the highest download (71.5Mbps) and upload (53.6Mbps) speeds in Hyderabad, said the Opensignal report. “Excitel beats second-placed Hathway by 18.2% in download speed and 14.8% in upload speed.”
