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Did you know that Africa's biggest-ever US IPO wasn't a fintech or an app?

It was a company that builds steel towers.

And this week, we’ll be telling its story.

Let’s get into it.

The irony is: 25 years ago, MTN won a license bid, and the man who lost that bid went and built the company MTN just paid $6.2 billion for.

This is the story of how the man who lost the race to run Africa's networks ended up building a fortune servicing them.

His name is Sam Darwish.

Sam Darwish grew up in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. 

He studied engineering at the American University of Beirut, then helped build Lebanon's first GSM network at Libancell.

In 1998, he moved to Lagos as Deputy Managing Director of Motophone, Nigeria's first GSM operator. 

Within months, his team had installed cell towers in five Nigerian cities.

Then the ground shifted. Nigeria's new civilian government called the old licensing exercise fraudulent, revoked the licences, and ran a fresh auction in 2001. 

MTN and Econet won. Motophone was disqualified.

Darwish was out of work in Lagos, at the exact moment Africa's mobile era was starting without him.

So he did the next best thing to owning a network. He decided to own the towers every network would need.

In 2001, Darwish, his brother Mohamad, and their friend William Saad founded IHS from a small office on Victoria Island, Lagos.

The idea was simple. 

Building towers is expensive and stressful for telcos, so let one specialist company build and run them, then rent space on the same tower to multiple operators.

Tower sharing already existed in the US and Europe. Across Africa, it basically didn't. 

IHS was betting that operators racing to cover a continent would rather rent than build.

The bet had numbers behind it. 

In 2001, Nigeria had roughly 150 million people and about 8,000 mobile phones. Every one of the phones to come would need a tower within reach.

The early years were modest: building towers from scratch, then maintaining them for operators.

But running this business was nothing like anywhere else in the world. Because as it turns out, Nigeria is…

Running a cell tower in Nigeria is close to a military operation.

No reliable grid means every site needs generators plus backup batteries, running 24/7. 

Nigerian operators were at one point burning through 40 million litres of diesel a month. 

Power can eat up to 60% of a tower company's operating costs.

Then you have to keep the generators fed and the site intact. 

In 2025 alone, thieves hit Nigerian telecom tower sites in 1,344 separate diesel-theft incidents and made off with 152 generators and 504 batteries.

Over the years, IHS had to out-engineer all of these issues. Short on capital, big on creativity, the company moved to solar, hybrid power and smart batteries. 

By 2020, over 45% of its African sites had solar available, and it spent around $200 million between 2022 and 2024 solarising sites, targeting a 50% cut in emissions intensity by 2030.

This dropped costs massively and boosted profits.

It turns out that building towers was never the moat.

It was learning to keep them alive in conditions most tower companies never face.

The model clicked in 2009 when IHS launched colocation services: one tower, one maintenance bill, multiple operators paying rent. 

Tower economics went from decent to beautiful.

Then IHS flipped the game. Instead of just building towers, it started buying them from the operators themselves.

Its best customer was its biggest seller. In 2012, MTN sold 1,800 towers in Côte d'Ivoire and Cameroon to IHS, then towers in Zambia and Rwanda in 2014.

The big one came in September 2014: 9,151 towers from MTN Nigeria, every tower in the market leader's network, in what was then Africa's largest tower transaction. But this one wasn't a clean sale: the towers went into a joint venture, with IHS running the show and MTN keeping a stake.

When MTN exited the Nigerian joint venture in 2017, it swapped that stake for shares in IHS, becoming its largest shareholder with roughly 25% in equity.

Global capital piled in behind the model. 

Singapore's GIC, Korea's KIC, the IFC and France's Wendel, which alone invested $779 million, all backed IHS.

IHS then took this playbook intercontinental, into Brazil and Colombia, powered by the same logic Nigeria had taught IHS: difficult markets are where the money is.

In October 2021, IHS listed on the New York Stock Exchange at a valuation near $7 billion, the largest US listing ever for a company of African heritage. 

A year later, it bought 5,701 towers from MTN South Africa too.

Today, IHS operates around 37,000 towers across Africa and Latin America. 

Its steel carries the calls and data of hundreds of millions of people.

Then, in February 2026, MTN, the company whose licence win ended Darwish's first act, agreed to buy the roughly 75% of IHS it didn't already own for $2.2 billion in cash, valuing the whole company at $6.2 billion. 

Once IHS completes the sale of its Latin American assets, MTN will own the entire African portfolio: close to 29,000 towers across Nigeria, South Africa, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire and Zambia.

MTN is paying billions to buy back towers it sold to IHS a decade ago, because the naira's collapse turned dollar-linked tower rent into MTN's problem and IHS's protection. 

The tenant decided it would rather be the landlord.

Sam Darwish spent 25 years building a company out of the wreckage of a revoked licence. 

His shareholders will exit at $8.50 per share, a 239% premium to where the stock sat when its strategic review began in 2024.

Every fintech transaction, every WhatsApp call, every startup demo in Lagos or Kinshasa runs over infrastructure someone had to build the hard way. 

IHS proved the most valuable position in African tech is infrastructure.

And while it might be boring, it’s way more foundational.

I’m curious. What other "boring" but powerful tech infrastructure across Africa do you know?

Let me know here.

That’s it for this week. See you on Sunday for a breakdown on This Week in African Tech.

Cheers,

The Tech Safari Team

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