Inside Hassanein Hiridjee’s $1.8 Billion Axian Telecom Bet

Madagascar’s Hassanein Hiridjee has spent much of the past decade building something most people off the island barely noticed: a pan-African telecom and fintech machine called Axian.

What started as a family-controlled business in Antananarivo has morphed into a holding group with ambitions that run from the Indian Ocean to West Africa. Axian’s telecom arm now stretches across markets including Madagascar, the Comoros, Tanzania, Senegal and Kenya, serving tens of millions of customers under brands such as Telma, Free, Yas and Zuku. The real sprint, though, has come in the last five years, as Hiridjee turned a regional operator into a deal factory.

He is not trying to become just another local mobile player. The ambition is bigger and, in his own shorthand to investors, much simpler: own the connectivity, own the customer relationship, then layer digital finance on top of it.

The current phase really begins in Tanzania. An Axian-led consortium bought Millicom’s local units, Tigo and Zantel, for roughly $100 million. Overnight, Axian went from a Madagascar-based operator with regional aspirations to a serious East African player. On top of the purchase price, the group pledged several hundred million dollars in network upgrades, 4G rollouts and rural coverage that had been left behind by previous owners.

It was a pattern that would repeat. Buy the asset, stabilise it, then pour capital into the weak spots. In Tanzania, that meant unclogging congested urban networks and building out towers well beyond the coastal cities. In the process, Axian gained millions of new customers and a seat at the table in a market where Airtel and Vodacom were used to being the dominant voices.

West Africa came next. Axian quietly built up its stake in Senegal’s Free operator, tightening its grip on one of the region’s fastest-growing and most competitive telecom markets. Further along the Indian Ocean, the group shifted from minority partner to controlling shareholder in the Comoros’ main carrier, consolidating its hold over a string of islands that punch above their weight in traffic for trade, tourism and remittances.

Then came the fibre push. In 2024, Axian agreed to acquire almost all of Wananchi Group, the Zuku fibre and pay-TV business based in Kenya, in a deal valued at a little over $60 million. That transaction pulls in fibre-to-the-home, enterprise connections and regional backbone assets in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Once folded into Axian’s existing mobile operations, the logic is straightforward: own the mobile customer and the fixed line that connects their home, their office and their warehouse.

Add it all up — the Tanzania mobile buy, the Wananchi acquisition, the stake-building in Senegal and the Comoros, and the multi-year capex pledges — and Axian has put well over a billion dollars of capital behind its telecom push in just a few years. Not every price tag is public, but the direction of travel is obvious.

Telecom, though, is only half the bet. Hiridjee has decided that controlling the pipes is not enough if someone else controls the wallets riding on those pipes.

Axian has bundled mobile-money services such as MVola in Madagascar and other regional wallets into a single digibank-style platform aimed at consumers and small businesses. The pitch is less about a shiny new app and more about an everyday utility: paying electricity bills, topping up phones, settling invoices with suppliers, receiving remittances from relatives working abroad.

In practice, that means stitching together payments, micro-savings, small-ticket lending and merchant tools under one roof. A partnership with Mastercard brings in virtual and physical cards, along with acceptance tools for small shops that may never see a traditional point-of-sale terminal. For a trader in Antananarivo or a kiosk owner in Dar es Salaam, Axian wants to be the default financial interface — accessed through a handset that, more often than not, runs on one of its networks.

The group has also taken a meaningful stake in an African e-commerce player, a move that looks less like a casual financial punt and more like a strategic bet on traffic. The more people shop, pay and sell through digital channels, the more data and payments flow across Axian’s networks. In Hiridjee’s model, connectivity and finance are no longer separate verticals; they are two sides of the same infrastructure play.

Behind the telecom and fintech headlines sits a wider Axian Group sprawling across energy, infrastructure and real estate. The company operates power assets, builds and manages infrastructure and holds property developments in several markets. That industrial backbone gives Hiridjee two advantages pure-play telecom rivals don’t always enjoy: diversified cash flow and local political access.

The funding strategy reflects that ambition. Rather than relying solely on local banks, Axian went to the international bond market in 2022 with a debut issue of about $420 million. It returned with a larger, oversubscribed deal in 2025, drawing in global asset managers and development finance institutions. Multilateral lenders have added dedicated credit lines for network expansion, fibre deployment and rural connectivity.

Put those bond proceeds alongside disclosed acquisition prices and formal investment commitments and the war chest earmarked for telecom and fintech easily clears $1.5–$1.8 billion over a short window. For a group headquartered in Madagascar, one of the world’s poorer nations, that scale is striking. It signals that Axian is no longer playing at the edges of African telecom; it intends to be in the same conversation as the continent’s long-established carriers.

The risks are obvious enough. Axian is taking on incumbents with deeper pockets and longer regulatory relationships in markets like Kenya and Tanzania. Integrating fibre, mobile and fintech platforms across multiple jurisdictions is messy and slow. Currency swings can eat into returns in a matter of months. Political shifts can turn today’s friendly environment into tomorrow’s licensing headache.

But there is also a window that may not stay open forever. As data usage climbs, regulators push for better coverage and consumers demand cheaper, more reliable connections, Africa’s telecom map is being redrawn. Hiridjee is betting that a nimble, privately controlled group can move faster than listed giants weighed down by legacy systems, shareholder pressure and generous dividends.

Strip away the corporate language and the strategy looks almost disarmingly simple: buy under-invested assets, pour capital into them, tie them together with fibre and then turn those networks into rails for digital finance. If Axian can make that formula work from Antananarivo to Dakar, the soft-spoken tycoon from Madagascar will have built one of the continent’s most unlikely telecom powerhouses.