SOUTH AFRICA – Pan-African communications provider SEACOM has completed 100% acquisition of South Africa’s FibreCo Telecommunications following the approval of the transaction by the Competition Commission.
The acquisition was made through SEACOM subsidiary, SEACOM South Africa. FibreCo owns and operates a national fibre network providing infrastructure and connectivity services across South Africa.
SEACOM is set to leverage on FibreCo’s network, which runs along South Africa’s highest-traffic transmission routes and links all major South Africa cities.
With the acquisition of FibreCo, SEACOM completes its “African Ring” by connecting its East and West coast submarine assets with a robust network of trans-South African fibre.
SEACOM chief executive officer, Byron Clatterbuck, said that SEACOM is set to increase its footprint in line with its commitment of offering an all integrated portfolio.
“This acquisition reaffirms SEACOM as the provider of choice to local and international data communications customers by expanding its wholesale portfolio to include dark-fibre infrastructure services in the metro and long-distance marketplace,” Byron said.
He added that SEACOM intends to bring a face lift to FibreCo’s national infrastructure for a more affordable, high speed-internet connectivity and cloud services to bandwidth-starved cities and towns along our new fibre routes.
“FibreCo’s customers will continue to experience the same high levels of service to which they are accustomed, with the added benefit that SEACOM will make further investment into the network to expand its portfolio of services,” Byron added.
Adds Chief Development Officer, Suveer Ramdhani said: “This transaction forms part of SEACOM’s greater growth strategy, which has included several ISP acquisitions, including most recently MacroLan and SAI.
While these previous transactions built up both our regional capability and our footprint of on-net buildings in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, the FibreCo network serves as a platform for SEACOM’s enterprise strategy to be extended to the rest of South Africa.”
SEACOM said that through its continent-spanning fibre optic submarine cable system, the firm connects South Africa to the east coast of Africa, India and Europe.
The acquisition will enable SEACOM South Africa now connect over 60 points of presence across South Africa, including major data
The SEACOM South Africa network connects the SEACOM subsea cable system, which lands in Mtunzini on the South Africa east coast, to the WACS cable, which lands at Yzerfontein, on the country’s west coast.
