L&L acts for Carlyle in its approximately 25% investment in Airtel’s Nxtra Data Limited

Bharti Airtel Limited (“Airtel”) has in its communication to the stock exchange and the annexed press release, confirmed that Airtel and Comfort Investments II, an affiliated entity of CAP V Mauritius Limited, an investment fund managed and advised by affiliated entities of The Carlyle Group (together, “Carlyle”) has entered into an agreement under which Comfort Investments II shall invest approximately US$235 million (approximately Rs. 1,788 Crore)  in Nxtra Data Limited (“Nxtra”), currently a wholly owned subsidiary of Airtel.

Nxtra is engaged in the data centre business offering secure data centre services to leading Indian and global enterprises, hyperscalers, start-ups, SMEs and governments. Nxtra’s nation-wide portfolio of 10 large data centres and more than 120 edge data centres provides customers with co-location services, cloud infrastructure, managed hosting, data backup, disaster recovery, and remote infrastructure management.

Airtel has mentioned in the communication that the post-money enterprise valuation of Nxtra is approximately US$1.2 billion and Carlyle will hold a stake of approximately 25% in the business upon completion of the transaction, with Airtel continuing to hold the remaining 75% stake.

L&L Partners advised Carlyle on the transaction. The transaction team at L&L Partners consisted of Mohit Saraf (Senior Partner); Sundeep Dudeja, Vaibhav Kakkar and Samarth Gupta (Partners); Sahil Arora (Senior Associate); Debarpan Ghosh and Keshav Pareek (Associates). Carlyle was also advised on the transaction by a team from Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer led by Simon Weller (Partner).