CENTURION, South Africa – 30 May 2017 – DFA, South Africa’s leading provider of open-access fibre infrastructure, announces that it has successfully secured additional term-debt funding of R1.25 billion. This follows the extension and increase to R1.1 billion of its revolving credit facility in December 2016.
The debt facilities will be used to refinance a maturing term loan and to finance the continued expansion of DFA’s extensive open-access national metro fibre footprint.
Cilliers Steyn, Chief Financial Officer of DFA, commented, ‘In a rapidly evolving world, we continue in our mission to provide high-quality open-access fibre infrastructure to our broad range of clients. Being a capital-intensive business, access to funding is vitally important, and we are very pleased with the funding support as well as the commitment from our high-quality syndicate of lenders, especially in the current difficult capital market conditions.
‘We thank our lenders, a number of which have funded us since our inception in 2007, for their continued support. We are also pleased with the vote of confidence from Standard Bank and Sanlam, who have joined our syndicate of term-loan providers, and from Govanhill Capital, who arranged the finance.
‘The new loans of four- and five-year terms increase the maturity profile of DFA’s debt funding. The lender syndicate comprises a balance of banks, fund managers, and financial companies, namely Absa, Futuregrowth Asset Management, Investec Asset Management, the KwaZulu-Natal Growth Fund, Liberty Group, Rand Merchant Bank, Sanlam, Standard Bank, and STANLIB Asset Management. The revolving credit facility was provided by DFA’s syndicate of banks, comprising Rand Merchant Bank, Absa Bank, and Standard Bank,’ concluded Cilliers.
DFA is the premier wholesale, open-access fibre-infrastructure and -connectivity provider in South Africa. We finance, build, install, manage, and maintain a world-class fibre network to transmit metro and long-haul telecommunications traffic. We started rolling out our fibre network in 2007, and to date, we have deployed over 13,000 km of ducting infrastructure in major metros, secondary cities, and smaller towns. Our network runs with an industry-leading uptime of 99.98%. We lease our secure transmission and backbone fibre infrastructure and provide associated connectivity services to telecommunications operators, Internet service providers, media conglomerates, tertiary education institutions, municipalities, government organizations, and other businesses, large and small, on equal terms. DFA is a Level 3 B-BBEE Contributor on the ICT Sector Codes.
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