Liquid Telecom has raised $307 million through a rights issue to fund its expansion of its data center business in Africa.
Rights issues are offers made to shareholders to buy additional shares to the company which helps it to raise capital.
The rights issue included an an additional $40 million from CDC Group Plc which is a development finance institution from the UK. This is CDC’s second investment in the company following a $180 million equity investment in 2018.
“CDC’s additional equity investment into Liquid Telecom represents another crucial step in connecting businesses in Africa, with Liquid Telecom at the forefront of the continent’s eruption in technology adoption. Africa has significant untapped economic potential that is being unlocked by improving connectivity, data storage and the use of cloud-based applications. This investment will bring significant economic benefits to developing markets across the continent,” Nic Rudnick, Group CEO of Liquid Telecom said .
These data centered are positioned to service increase demands for data storage and cloud based applications. It is estimated that less than 20% of potential telecommunications enterprise demand is being served in Africa.
The company says that their data center development aims to reduce IT related costs for companies, spur innovation by offering data storage and Software-as-a-Service applications to SME’s.
The data center business in Africa seems to be on everybody’s radar and Liquid Telecom wants a piece of the data center pie. Amazon recently announced that they have plans to setup an Edge Location in Kenya. Konza’s National Data Center phase one was announced a while ago to be complete. KenGen also wants to go deep into the data center business from tender documents expressing their interest.