The South African Housing and Infrastructure Fund (SAHIF), founded by Rali Mampeule is the largest black private investor in South Africa’s optical fibre industry, this after SAHIF did a R1.5 billion equity funding round concluded in December 2020 in a consortium with Africa Infrastructure Investment Managers (AIIM) and STOA Infra and Energy (STOA) to support MetroFibre’s R3 billion capital expansion plan over three years.
Two years later in 2022, SAHIF founders and the consortium bought a further 25.8% interest in MetroFibre from Patrice Motsepe’s African Rainbow Capital, Sanlam Private Equity and a minority shareholder.
The transaction made the three entities to be the 80 percent majority shareholders of MFN. MetroFibre, which launched in 2010, is a high-growth player in South Africa’s Fibre-To-The-Home (FTTH) and Fibre-To-The-Business (FTTB) markets. Over the last 10 years, MetroFibre has expanded its service offering to both residential and corporate customers in line with its strategic objective of being a diversified operator.
SAHIF, which is owned by Rali Mampeule’s trust is the current strategic empowerment partner to MetroFibre Networx. In 2024, it was announced by Techfinancial that “After five years of investing in Metrofibre, the South African Housing and Infrastructure Fund (SAHIF), led by its founder and CEO Rali Mampeule, has announced its decision to exit the business.”
In a New Development, following SAHIF’s co-shareholders (AIIM and STOA) recent announcement and confirmation of the acquisition of Octotel and RSAWeb deal, SAHIF’s board has indicated that they have considered postponing the sale of their shares indefinitely because the new deal makes their investment at MFN even more attractive. My Broadband announced that “These two FNOs cover nearly 900 000 properties with their fibre-to-the-home networks.”
“If you were to combine these two networks, the result would be that Metrofibre would become the third-largest fibre network in the country. MetroFibre owns and manages open-access fibre infrastructure in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Eastern Cape, North West, and Mpumalanga, while Octotel operates on open-access fibre network in the Western Cape.
''Combining their networks would make them highly competitive with Vumatel and Openserve in terms of homes passed by their networks” said My Broadband. It further mentioned: “If you were to combine MetroFibre’s 510,000 homes as of December 2024 and Octotel’s 372,000 homes as of June 2024, the network would be the third largest in the country, with 882 000 homes passed.
The obvious conclusion is that SAHIF’s value will almost double in value with their current effective 20% shareholding in Metrofibre. SAHIF announced that it had a busy year in 2024, raising R700 million for expansion in the first half of the year alone. As part of its expansion plans, the fund is also acquiring a majority stake in one of South Africa’s emerging fibre network operators specialising in prepaid fibre services.
SAHIF was asked about its sector consolidation strategy, but it hadn’t responded by publication. The Fibre to the Home (FTTH) market in South Africa still has significant potential, with approximately 19 million households yet to be connected to the internet. The majority of these households are located in the emerging markets of townships”
