Madagascar's richest man Ylias Akbaraly eyes $450 million Nigeria TV deal

Ylias Akbaraly, the industrialist widely regarded as Madagascar's richest man, is seeking a contract worth about €400 million ($449 million) for his French company Thomson Broadcast to build radio and television broadcasting infrastructure across Nigeria, and he is counting on French President Emmanuel Macron's state visit to get it signed.

Stéphane Bollon, Thomson Broadcast's chief executive, will travel with Macron to Nigeria at the end of October and hopes to win final approval from the Nigerian government during the trip. The two sides first set out the project in a memorandum of understanding in 2025.

The Paris-based company, which makes transmitters and other equipment for radio and TV networks, has been in talks for several months with Nigeria's information minister, Mohammed Idris. Bollon traveled to Abuja in June and helped organize part of Idris's visit to Paris in September. During that trip he arranged a meeting between Idris and Éléonore Caroit, a junior minister at France's foreign ministry. Idris also met Jérémie Robert, Macron's adviser on Africa.

Four state broadcasters

The contract would be signed with four Nigerian bodies: the state television network, the Nigerian Television Authority; its radio counterpart, the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria; the international broadcaster Voice of Nigeria; and the industry regulator, the National Broadcasting Commission.

Once the government gives its approval, Thomson Broadcast will still have to raise the money to carry out the work, mostly from private lenders.

Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, missed the 2015 international deadline to move from analog to digital terrestrial television and has been switching over city by city since a pilot launch in Jos in 2016.

Macron's visit was announced in July by Marc Fonbaustier, France's ambassador in Abuja, who said the two presidents would review progress on a partnership covering trade, security, agriculture and culture. Fonbaustier knows Thomson Broadcast's work in the region. As ambassador in Conakry, he oversaw the company's €66 million ($74 million) contract with Guinea, signed in March 2022, to move that country's television and radio to digital broadcasting and build new transmission sites. That project was backed by a loan from French state investment bank Bpifrance and the French Treasury. After years of delays, work in Guinea is expected to start in the coming weeks. Fonbaustier moved to Abuja in 2024.

From soap maker to broadcaster

Akbaraly controls Thomson Broadcast through Redland, the holding company that oversees his family's Sipromad group. Redland employs more than 3,000 people directly and indirectly and operates in Madagascar and the wider Indian Ocean region, mainland Africa, France, the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates.

His family, of Gujarati origin, settled in Madagascar in 1918. His father, Sermamod Akbaraly, founded Sipromad in 1972 to make detergents. Ylias Akbaraly, who studied management in Paris and earned a master's degree in marketing from the University of California, Berkeley, took over the company in 2000.

Under him, Sipromad has grown into a group of nearly 20 companies spanning manufacturing, tourism and aviation, real estate, renewable energy, agribusiness and broadcasting. It also holds minority stakes in businesses including Brink's Madagascar and Banque des Mascareignes Madagascar.

Sipromad moved into broadcasting in August 2018, when it bought the television and radio business of France's Arelis Broadcast and renamed it Phenixya, now trading as Thomson Broadcast. In 2022, Thomson Broadcast bought GatesAir, a U.S. maker of radio and TV transmitters, giving the group a foothold in America. GatesAir was sold to Saothair Capital Partners in October 2025.

Akbaraly and his wife, Cinzia Catalfamo Akbaraly, set up the Akbaraly Foundation in 2008 to fund health and social projects, mainly in Madagascar.