FINALLY, MTN GOES PUBLIC! LISTS SHARES ON NIGERIA STOCK EXCHANGE NEXT WEEK

Eighteen years after opening shop in Nigeria, mobile telecommunications giant MTN Nigeria may finally throw its doors open to the general public as it lists shares on the Nigeria Stock Exchange next week.

MTN, according to sources familiar with the transaction, could go ahead with the listing on May 16, 2019, barring any further delay, as some steps required by the Nigerian Stock Exchange still have to be completed, they said.

“We don’t have a specific date, we are looking at some time before the end of this quarter,” Tobechukwu Okigbo, MTN Nigeria’s head of corporate relations, told Paul Wallace of Bloomberg on phone.

MTN Nigeria registered 20.35 billion ordinary shares with Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission this week. It plans to list around 20 percent of those on the exchange and they could trade at N80 to N90, said one of the people. That would give the unit a market value of as much as N1.8 trillion ($5.1 billion), making it the second-biggest public firm in Africa’s main oil producer, after Dangote Cement Plc. It will be the largest when measured by revenue.

MTN agreed to an initial public offering of its Nigeria business as part of the settlement of a reduced $1 billion fine in the country in 2016. The listing planned for next week is the first of two stages, with a sell down of MTN’s majority stake to take place at a later date.

The company appointed former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the Emir of Kano, to its board last week, in preparation for the listing.

MTN remains locked in a legal battle with Nigeria’s Attorney General over a $2 billion tax claim. The Nigerian arm is the largest of MTN’s 20-market portfolio, accounting for almost a quarter of its 233 million subscribers. (with BLOOMBERG)