Angola’s Biggest IPO Raises US$321 Million on Unitel

ANGOLA · MARKETS

The Angola Unitel IPO raised 300.3 billion kwanzas, about US$321 million on Bloomberg’s conversion, making it the country’s largest share sale and the first listing in Luanda that is not a bank or an insurer. It priced at the top of the range, drew 11,264 investors, and sold shares the state took by decree four years ago.

What the Angola Unitel IPO actually sold

The offer ran from 6 to 24 July and the results were published on the 27th. Of the 7.5 million shares on sale, one million were reserved for employees and 6.5 million went to the public and to institutions, foreign buyers included.

Investors bid for 9,054,299 shares against the 7.5 million available, a subscription rate of 120.72 percent. That was enough to price at 40,040 kwanzas, the top of the indicated range.

Multiply that by the 50 million shares in issue and the company is valued at 2.002 trillion kwanzas. All 50 million were admitted to trading, not only the 15 percent sold.

The dollar figure depends entirely on which rate you take. Bloomberg and Billionaires.Africa land on US$321 million, Agence Ecofin on US$327 million and Reuters on US$329 million, while the Lusa-fed Portuguese press reported US$318 million.

None of them published the exchange rate used on the day. Readers should treat the kwanza figure as the fact and the dollar figure as an approximation.

Eleven thousand new shareholders on a six-name exchange

The Angolan Debt and Securities Exchange, BODIVA, opened in 2014 to trade government paper and only began listing equity in 2022. Before Unitel it carried five names, all of them banks, insurers or the exchange itself.

The largest previous flotation was Banco de Fomento Angola in September 2025, which raised 221 billion kwanzas and was five times oversubscribed. Unitel is bigger, and it is the first company on the board that sells something other than financial services.

The exchange filled 16,571 of 17,549 subscription orders, from 11,264 investors, in a market where most retail savers have never owned a listed share. Several international wires reported a different pair of numbers; the figures here are the exchange’s own.

That participation is the real test rather than the headline. Ecofin’s verdict was blunt: the sale did not fix the market’s central handicap, which is liquidity, and post-listing volumes will show whether those shareholders are a durable base or a one-off rush.

There is already evidence of the strain. Between late June and mid-July every other listed Angolan stock fell as investors moved money into the Unitel offer, with the state insurer down 18 percent.

The shares came from Isabel dos Santos

Unitel was once split into four quarters. A Portuguese vehicle held one, Sonangol’s telecoms arm another, Isabel dos Santos held a quarter through Vidatel, and General Leopoldino do Nascimento held the last through Geni.

Sonangol bought the Portuguese block from Brazil’s Oi in January 2020, taking it to half the company. In October 2022 President João Lourenço nationalised the Vidatel and Geni holdings by decree, bringing the whole of Unitel under state control.

Dos Santos, the daughter of the president who ruled Angola for 38 years, contests those decisions and denies wrongdoing. In 2024 the Court of Appeal in London upheld a worldwide order freezing about £580 million of her assets in a claim brought against her by Unitel itself.

That is the uncomfortable part of the story for an outside buyer. The proceeds flow to a state that acquired the shares by decree rather than by purchase, and Unitel’s own prospectus acknowledges continuing legal uncertainty over the nationalised shares.

A cyberattack, one day before the bell

On 28 July, hours after settlement and a day before trading opened, Unitel said it had detected an attack on its technology infrastructure at about 2:20 in the morning. Voice, mobile data and internet services went down across the country.

The company gave no information on where the attack came from or whether data had been taken. Local reporting said the disruption ran for more than 24 hours, easing only as the opening bell rang on the 29th.

Neither the exchange nor the market regulator delayed the listing. For a company that reports 20.8 million customers and a 76 percent market share in its 2025 annual report, the episode is a reminder that operational risk sits close to the surface.

Those share figures deserve a caveat the company itself supplies. Unitel says they come from its own systems and should be read as an estimate, and the regulator’s 2024 data put its share nearer 73 percent.

What PROPRIV has left to sell

The listing is the flagship of PROPRIV, the privatisation programme Lourenço launched by decree in 2019 to shrink the state’s commercial holdings and widen the domestic capital market. It runs to 2026 and was narrowed in February to ten strategic companies.

The scale is substantial. Of 130 assets targeted, about 120 have been sold for contracted proceeds near 1.28 trillion kwanzas, or roughly US$1.4 billion, though some 17 percent of those payments are still outstanding.

Among the ten still to go are the diamond monopoly Endiama, the flag carrier TAAG and the fixed-line operator Angola Telecom. “A listing broadens ownership among thousands of shareholders and raises governance standards because companies become more accountable to investors,” Alvaro Fernão, who chairs the state asset agency IGAPE, told Bloomberg.

The clock is political as much as commercial. Angola’s next general election is due by August 2027, which leaves little more than a year between this sale and the vote.

What a foreign investor is really buying

The asset itself is profitable, though not simply so. Unitel reported net profit of 158.4 billion kwanzas for 2025, up 59 percent, but the jump came largely from selling part of its stake in Banco de Fomento Angola and from that bank’s dividends rather than from selling more airtime.

It still owns 36.9 percent of BFA after that sale, which gives Unitel shareholders indirect exposure to a listed bank. It also operates in São Tomé and Príncipe and in Cape Verde.

The complications are around the asset rather than in it. They are the depth of the market the shares trade in, the unresolved litigation over how the state came to own them, and a currency that has repeatedly made dollar returns lag local ones.

For readers in Latin America the pattern will be familiar. A resource-dependent government sells minority stakes in state champions to broaden a shallow local market and bring retail savers in, and the interesting question is never the first-day price but whether anyone is still trading the stock a year later.

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