Subsea Roundup: MainOne, SubCom, Telecom Egypt, INDIGO

In subsea cable news from this week that I didn’t get to: an expansion, two bits of M&A, and new build milestone.

MainOne has picked SubCom to build two new branches off into French West Africa. SubCom will be hooking up the cable system directly to Dakar, Senegal and Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire, giving it five points of call in the region now. The buildout will also include an upgrade in capacity for the system to 10Tbps

For its part SubCom is apparently changing hands. TE Connectivity announced earlier this wee that it has signed a definitive agreement to sell the unit to the private equity folks at Cerberus Capital Management. The price tag was $325M in cash and the deal is expected to close in TE’s fiscal 2019. SubCom is expected to have some $700M in sales for 2018.

Telecom Egypt has completed its acquisition of the MENA cable system from Orascom. The $90M deal has been in the works since May, and includes $50M in assumed debt. The MENA cable runs from Sicily east to and across Egypt, down the red sea, and over to Oman and Mumbai, India. Next they will finish up a previously announced IRU sale to Bharti Airtel for capacity on both MENA and TE North.

And down under, the INDIGO consortium says that it has completed the first section of its new cable system. The INDIGO cable has landed in the western Australian port of Perth, and the 2,400km route to Christmas Island is now in place. Now they move on to the hard part, laying cable from Christmas Island up to Singapore and Jakarta, which is known as Indigo East. Then the same ship will turn around and work on INDIGO west between Perth and Sydney.

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Categories: Mergers and Acquisitions · Undersea cables