Anil Ambani in Mumbai on Thursday. (Fotocorp)

Mumbai, July 19: A cabal of seven international investors is picking up a 5 per cent stake in Reliance Telecom Infrastructure Ltd (RTIL), the subsidiary of Reliance Communications (R-Com), for Rs 1,400 crore ($337.5 million).

RTIL was created by spinning off the wireless tower assets of R-Com and the stake sale values the company at Rs 27,000 crore ($6.75 billion). The sale comes less than 48 hours after R-Com chairman Anil Ambani told shareholders at the annual general meeting that the company was looking at four value unlocking initiatives. One of them was a stake sale and the other was to list RTIL on the bourses after a public flotation.

The investors are reckoned to be institutions from the US, Europe and Asia but their names haven’t been disclosed. Speaking to reporters here today, Ambani said the company would pursue opportunities to unlock the value through an IPO of RTIL and a strategic sale at an appropriate time.

Ambani said the unlocking of value was evident from the fact that RTIL’s equity valuation of Rs 27,000 crore translated into around Rs 135 per R-Com share, which is nearly 25 per cent of its market price of around Rs 565 per share.

The offering was oversubscribed, with RTIL receiving many queries and the order book stood at over $2 billion.

Ambani said going by the interest shown by various investors, the company was confident of getting an even higher valuation in the days ahead. RTIL’s valuation based on the transaction is much more than what brokerages had anticipated. Firms such as CLSA, Macquaire, Kotak, HSBC and Morgan Stanley had assigned valuations ranging between Rs 13,000 and Rs 20,000 crore.

R-Com shares surged to an intra-day peak of Rs 586.90 before settling at Rs 579.30 on Thursday — a gain of 2.13 per cent over Wednesday’s close.

In view of RTIL’s ambitious expansion programme for the current fiscal, it is felt that the company’s enterprise valuation will hit Rs 36,000 crore by March 2008. Ambani said R-Com’s residual 95 per cent equity stake in RTIL was now valued at Rs 26,000 crore.

RTIL has 14,000 towers. The plan is to add another 23,000 this fiscal, making it the largest tower company in the world.