BLACK #FABS:::Largest Pan-African Telecom Service Provider founded by Issam Darwish, Lebanese-Nigerian Multi-Millionaire.

 

Issam Darwish received his BE degree with distinction in CCE in 1992. After graduation, he joined MCI as the Satellite Systems Manager. From 1994 to 1997, he worked as the Network Manager for Libancell. In 1997, Mr Darwish joined Lintel and became its Vice Chairman, Director of Projects. Lintel created and managed telecom networks worldwide (Liberia, Belarus, Yemen, Syria, Jordan, and Sierra Leone).

 In 1998, he moved to Nigeria to become the Deputy Managing Director of Motophone, Nigeria’s first GSM operator. In 2001, he became a founding member of UBC Services Inc., a specialized telecom infrastructure provider with more than a 1000 employees in Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, Sudan, Saudi, Arabia, and others.

One of Issam’s biggest achievements was to convert UBC’s Nigerian subsidiary to a public liability company, listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange. IHS is currently the largest pan-African telecom service provider.

 

IHS Towers, a Nigerian phone tower company founded this Lebanese-Nigerian businessman Issam Darwish and has raised $2 billion in equity and $600 million in debt in one of the largest equity fundraising exercises by an African company in recent times.

 According to a Reuters report, IHS Tower, which is Africa’s largest provider of telecom tower infrastructure for mobile phone operators, raised new equity from a group of new and existing shareholders, while the loan was provided by a consortium of Nigerian banks including Standard Chartered, Standard Bank, Investec and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC). IHS will use the funds to improve infrastructure spending and finance some recently agreed acquisitions.

 In September, South African mobile telecoms giant MTN announced that it would sell 9,151 mobile towers in Nigeria to IHS in a cost-cutting measure. Before then, in August, IHS acquired 2,136 towers from Etisalat Nigeria.

“This is the largest equity raising by a private entity for the past 7-8 years in Africa — you’ve had mining, banks and now telecom infrastructure as a standalone sector is commanding this much interest from the international markets,” said Darwish. 

“This sends the right signal, it’s saying the international investor community believes in Africa and they’re putting a substantial amount of money behind that.”

 Issam Darwish, who is worth about $200 million according to an article by Forbes Africa, founded IHS Towers in 2001 with his business partner, William Saad.  Ranked as the largest towers company in Africa with close to 20,000 sites spread across Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Rwanda and Zambia. The company’s investors include Wendel Group, a French investment company and Pan-African private equity firm Emerging Capital Partners.

 The company is currently listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange.