Helios Towers Brand Guidelines: A 2009 Towerco From Ghana to Oman, Listed in London

Formed in 2009, first sites in Ghana.

Helios Towers began in 2009. English Wikipedia says the company was established in Mauritius that year with financial backing from George Soros, Millicom and Bharti Airtel; the company itself says simply that it was “formed in 2009.” Today it is a UK-based listed company, Helios Towers plc, which gives London as its contact office, while its towers stand in Africa and, since 2022, the Middle East.

Its model is the independent tower company: a business that owns masts and leases space on them to several mobile operators, so that each operator does not have to build its own. According to the company’s own timeline, its first portfolio was more than 800 sites bought in Ghana in 2010. In 2011 it entered Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo by taking over more than 1,200 sites in each from Tigo. In 2014 it bought more than 1,000 sites from Vodacom Tanzania; in 2015 it entered Congo Brazzaville with about 400 sites from Airtel; and in 2016 it took on about 1,000 more Airtel sites in the DRC.

A stock-market listing took two attempts. English Wikipedia records an aborted attempt at a public issue in 2018. The second went ahead: Global Finance magazine reported in October 2019 that Helios Towers held its initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange on 14 October 2019, floating about a quarter of the company. Selling shareholders, the magazine said, included the International Finance Corporation, Millicom and Bharti Airtel, and other holders included Helios Investment Partners, Quantum Strategic Partners, Albright Capital Management and RIT Capital Partners. The chief executive at the time was Kash Pandya. English Wikipedia says the company is a constituent of the FTSE 250 index.

From five African countries to nine markets.

At the time of the listing, Global Finance counted more than 6,800 towers across five countries — South Africa, the DRC, Ghana, the Republic of Congo and Tanzania — rented to mobile operators including Vodacom, MTN and Airtel. South Africa was the newest of them: the company says it entered that market in 2019 on a greenfield basis, building sites rather than buying a portfolio.

Growth after the listing came largely through portfolio purchases. The company’s timeline lists an agreement in 2020 to buy more than 1,200 sites from Free Senegal; agreements in 2021 with Airtel Africa for about 1,400 sites in Madagascar and Malawi; and an agreement the same year to acquire more than 2,500 sites from Omantel. The Oman deal, covering 2,519 sites, closed in 2022, which the company describes as its first step into the Middle East. Tom Greenwood became chief executive the same year, according to the company.

In its Q3 2026 overview, Helios Towers reported 15,688 sites and 35,379 tenancies — a tenancy being one operator’s equipment on one tower — across nine markets: Tanzania, the DRC, Ghana, Congo Brazzaville, South Africa, Senegal, Madagascar, Malawi and Oman. Its website describes the work as building, acquiring and operating shared towers, with site acquisition and build, maintenance and security, energy management and space for customers’ equipment. An operator can lease space on an existing tower, which the industry calls colocation, or commission a new build-to-suit site.

In 2025 the company marked fifteen years of operation and set out a five-year strategy named IMPACT 2030 at a Capital Markets Day in November. Its leadership page names Sir Samuel Jonah as chair and Tom Greenwood as group chief executive.

Shared towers, leased to operators.

Tower companies sell something most people never notice: space on a mast. A mobile operator rents a slot on a tower, a rooftop or a small cell, and several rivals can share the same steel. That makes the business hard to picture, so the companies that run it tend to lean on a small set of images to explain what they do.

The most common is the structure itself. A steel lattice mast against a wide sky, a slim monopole beside a motorway, a cluster of antennas over a city skyline at dusk, or a lone rural tower at sunset all stand in for coverage that cannot be seen. People appear too, usually climbers in harnesses and helmets working high on a tower, a reminder that the sites are built and maintained by hand.

The second register is the map. Annual reports and investor pages often show a country or a continent dotted with sites, because the number and spread of locations is the product. Site counts, country lists and phrases such as “neutral host” or “shared infrastructure” do much of the talking.

The industry also meets in public. Trade shows such as Connect (X) in the United States and the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona put tower companies beside the operators they serve, with stands, renderings of towers and maps of networks. For a design guide, the interest lies in how a business made of steel, leases and coordinates turns that into a calm, legible identity.

A purpose line, three values and a playbook.

The company states its verbal identity plainly. Its purpose line is “Connecting people, powering growth,” which runs through its website alongside a short self-description: an independent mobile tower company for Africa and the Middle East. Its values page names three values — Integrity, Partnership and Excellence — and spells each one out, from honesty and transparency to long-term relationships with customers and “challenging the status quo.”

It also gives its way of working a name. The company says it applies a common operating playbook called Business Excellence in every market, embedded company-wide in 2016, and describes an engineering mindset and a Lean Six Sigma culture; it says 94% of its employees are local hires and that it works with a network of in-country partners. Its solutions page carries testimonials from senior managers at Airtel, Vodacom International, Omantel and AXIAN Telecom.

The timeline on its website reads as a map of entries — Ghana in 2010, Tanzania and the DRC in 2011, Congo Brazzaville in 2015, South Africa in 2019, Senegal, Madagascar and Malawi after 2020, Oman in 2022 — and that sequence of portfolio purchases is what the company itself puts at the centre of its story.

For a design guide, Helios Towers shows a tower company whose identity is carried by a plain purpose line, three stated values and a history told market by market. Compare IHS Towers and American Tower, two more tower companies in this series. For this guide we use a deep navy, a sunlit orange and a warm sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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