Tycoon Moh Damush's Telecel Group bids for TalkTalk's UK wholesale telecom arm

Telecel Group, the pan-African telecommunications operator co-founded and run by chief executive Moh Damush, has submitted a bid for PlatformX Communications, the wholesale infrastructure business that UK operator TalkTalk has put up for sale.

A successful deal would rank among the largest cross-border acquisitions ever attempted by an African-headquartered telecom group, pushing a company built on African mobile networks into the heart of Britain's wholesale connectivity market. Market reports put the potential price at up to $603 million (£450 million).

PlatformX Communications, known as PXC, is one of the United Kingdom's largest independent wholesale telecom platforms. It sells connectivity, cloud, voice and information technology services to other operators, businesses and public-sector bodies, and runs a Tier 1 national network that reaches about 98 percent of UK premises. The unit serves roughly 2.75 million customers.

The sale is part of a broader strategic review at TalkTalk, one of Britain's biggest consumer broadband providers, which has been trying to cut debt and simplify its structure. The company brought in investment bank PJT Partners to run the process. TalkTalk carved itself into three businesses in a 2023 demerger, splitting off a consumer arm, PXC and a business-to-business unit, and it has spent the period since under heavy financial strain.

Those pressures are steep. TalkTalk carried more than $3.5 billion (£2.6 billion) in debt heading into the sale and leaned on emergency funding to stay afloat, including a capital injection led by existing lender Ares Management. Selling PXC, the most valuable of its remaining pieces, is central to the plan to steady the balance sheet.

PXC is a substantial asset on its own terms. In the financial year that ended in March 2025, the business reported revenue of $1.57 billion (£1.169 billion) and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of $397 million (£296 million), a scale that underlines its place in Britain's telecom infrastructure.

The price under discussion is not new to the business. In 2024, Australian financial group Macquarie offered around £450 million for a 40 percent stake in the wholesale unit, a deal that fell apart the same year. The recurrence of that figure gives some sense of how the market has valued the asset even as TalkTalk's wider troubles have deepened.

Telecel is not bidding into an empty field. Private equity firm Epiris has teamed up with PXC executive chairman Tom O'Hagan on a rival management buyout, and investment group Octopus has also been linked to the auction. The mix of trade and financial suitors points to real competition, even in a distressed sale. TalkTalk is separately advancing the sale of its consumer broadband division, which has drawn interest from parties including VodafoneThree.

Behind Telecel's bid sits a company that has grown quickly across Africa. Damush co-founded the group with Nicolas Bourg, who serves as chairman, and the two have built out operations spanning mobile networks, international voice and data services and digital platforms. The group's highest-profile move came in early 2023, when it completed the purchase of a majority stake in Vodafone's Ghana business and rebranded the operator as Telecel Ghana, one of the larger telecom acquisitions on the continent in recent years.

The company has kept up an aggressive posture since. Telecel has signaled plans to bid in Ghana's coming 5G license auction, and its telecom roots stretch back decades across markets that have included the Central African Republic. A move on PXC would mark a sharp change in direction, carrying the group beyond Africa into a mature, competitive European market rather than the fast-growing economies where it has concentrated.

The logic is about infrastructure and reach. PXC would hand Telecel a ready-made wholesale platform in one of the world's most developed telecom markets, along with a national network and an established customer base, assets that are expensive and slow to build from scratch. It would also give the group a foothold in the plumbing of UK connectivity at a moment when demand for data capacity keeps climbing.

Questions remain. A deal of this size would test Telecel's ability to finance and absorb a large overseas business while managing its African operations, and the auction is far from settled, with well-resourced rivals in the running. Regulators and TalkTalk's lenders will also shape the outcome, given the debt tied to the wider group and the strategic weight of the network PXC controls.

Damush has framed Telecel's expansion as a long-term bet on building scale and connecting underserved markets. A win in the PXC contest would stretch that ambition well beyond the continent and place an African-owned company among the operators that keep Britain's wholesale networks running. Whether Telecel prevails will come down to price, financing and how TalkTalk's lenders weigh a bidder from outside the UK against buyers closer to home.