RJIL raises $750-mn 12-year loan backed by K-Exim

Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd (RJIL), a subsidiary of Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), has raised a $750-million loan from Korea Exim Bank, which will be used primarily to finance the telecom equipment bought from Samsung Electronics.

RJIL, which is gearing upto launch its 4G services in the country, has bought the equipment for the network rollout.

The loan is guaranteed by RIL, the company said in a statement.

This is the first loan between Reliance group and Korea Exim Bank and has a door-to-door tenor of 12 years, including a two-year availability period and repayable over 10 years thereafter.

This deal is notably Korea Exim Bank's largest telecom infrastructure financing till date. It is also Korea Exim Bank's largest deal in India.

Korea Exim Bank is funding $440 million of the loan as a direct funding and the balance $310 million is being funded under the K-Exim covered guarantee by 11 of Reliance's relationship banks.

These include the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Ltd, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Ltd, Banco Santander SA.

The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd, BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole Corporate and Investment Bank, Commerzbank AG, ING Bank, JPMorgan Chase Bank, NA, Mizuho Bank, Ltd, and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and a new relationship NongHyup Bank.

Firming up its plans to launch 4G services in the country, RJIL had been signing telecom infrastructure sharing agreements, the latest being with Indus Towers.

Under the agreement, RJIL will use Indus Towers' infrastructure to rollout services across the country. The company would lease the infrastructure based on prevailing market rates, it said in a statement on Monday.

The company also entered into an agreement with Tower Vision for 8,400 towers in May, and ATC India for 11,000 towers earlier in April.

Similar it has signed agreements with Viom Networks for 42,000 telecom towers and Bharti Infratel for 36,000 towers in March.

RJIL had also signed a comprehensive telecom infrastructure sharing agreement with Bharti Airtel in December last year and a global data connectivity deal earlier in April 2013. It had also signed various agreements with Reliance Communications for sharing the latter's inter-city and intra-city optic fibre infrastructure.

The agreements with RCom are for nearly 1,20,000 fiber-pair km of optic fibre and 500,000 fibre pair km.

RJIL holds pan India unified license. RJIL holds spectrum in 1800 MHz (across 14 circles) and 2300 MHz (across 22 circles) capable of offering fourth generation (4G) wireless services.