Malagasy billionaire Hassanein Hiridjee renames AXIAN Telecom as Yas Group

AXIAN Telecom has renamed itself Yas Group, adopting the brand it gave its mobile networks two years ago as the name of the whole company.

The change was announced on Monday, Sept. 14. Yas Group will now be the name used with shareholders, partners and regulators, while the businesses underneath keep the names customers already know.

Hassanein Hiridjee chairs the Yas board and runs AXIAN Group, the family conglomerate that owns it. When the mobile operators were united under Yas in 2024, he said, the aim was a brand capable of carrying the business at continental scale, and two years of independent recognition had shown it could do that. Adopting Yas Group gives shareholders and partners a single corporate identity as the company enters its next phase of growth in Africa.

The half-year numbers explain why he is bothering.

Yas reported revenue of $980 million in the six months to June, up 26% on the same period last year. It had 45.5 million mobile subscribers, 15.7 million active data users and 19 million people using its mobile financial services.

The growth is not coming from selling airtime. Digital and mobile financial services rose 42% and now generate 19% of revenue, against 63% for mobile and fixed services and 11% for infrastructure. Mixx, the group's mobile money brand, sits in that fastest-growing segment.

The infrastructure is substantial in its own right. Yas owns 5,210 telecom towers and shares a further 3,756, which between them hosted 5,071 tenants at the end of June, meaning rival operators pay to hang their equipment on Hiridjee's masts. That business runs through TowerCo of Africa, Stellarix and Silver Links.

Mobile and fixed services under the Yas brand operate in Tanzania, Madagascar, the Comoros, Togo and Senegal.

Development lenders are funding the expansion. Proparco, the French development finance institution, signed a partnership in May with Yas and AXIAN Energy committing up to €300 million, about $346 million, over three years. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development followed in July with a senior loan of up to €270 million for digital infrastructure, including a committed facility of up to €170 million for Senegal and Kenya.

That takes the money Hiridjee has raised from development institutions since last year to around $730 million.

He has also been buying technology rather than building it. Yas signed a cooperation agreement with Huawei in February covering connectivity, digital finance and operations using 5G, cloud networks and artificial intelligence, and a deal with Oracle in April to run the group on a single cloud management platform. In March it partnered with AST SpaceMobile on direct-to-device services, the technology that connects an ordinary smartphone straight to a satellite, aimed at areas where building masts does not pay.

The man behind it is 51 and came to the business through his family.

Hiridjee was born in Antananarivo in 1975 into a Khoja family, known in Madagascar as Karane, that arrived from India in 1866. His uncles founded a textile manufacturer called Hirimix in the 1950s. He left the Lycée Français de Tananarive in 1992, took a degree at ESCP in Paris, worked in French finance and returned in 1997 to run the family firm.

What followed was a sequence of pivots. Real estate in 1995. Energy in 2004 through Électricité de Madagascar and a stake in the fuel distributor Jovena. Telecoms the same year, when the family bought the newly privatised Télécom Malagasy, followed by the launch of Telma Mobile in 2006. He and his brother Amin consolidated everything under the Axian name in 2015.

Axian now operates across 32 countries and territories in telecoms, energy, financial services, real estate and innovation, and was Madagascar's largest company by turnover with revenue of $1.9 billion in 2022. The telecoms arm is registered in Mauritius, where Hassan Jaber runs it as chief executive.

Hiridjee has been putting money into African e-commerce as well. He joined the International Finance Corporation in a $50 million equity raise for Jumia in August, having taken a seat on the company's supervisory board a year earlier.

Not everything has gone his way at home. Madagascar stripped four private distributors, Jovena among them, of the fuel import arrangement they had run for 27 years, handing it to a state agency last month.