Indonesia’s XL Axiata is looking again to sell off telecom towers to raise as much as $500 million to reduce its debt, which increased after it acquired Axis Telecom.

The operator, majority owned by Axiata Group, confirmed with the Wall Street Journal that it was in the process of selling towers and aims to close the bidding process this week. It requested bids last week for about 2,000 towers and aims to complete the sale by the end of the year, sources said.

XL purchased Axis in May 2014 for $865 million and said it borrowed IDR29.6 trillion (about $260 million at the time) for the acquisition. The weakening of the rupiah against the US dollar over the past two years has sharply increased its debt.

Last year XL made a number of moves to pay off its debt early and convert $580 million in unhedged dollar-denominated debts to rupiah. Its overall debt dropped to IDR27 trillion from IDR30.4 trillion as of 30 September last year and it has fully hedged its remaining external US dollar loans until maturity, it said.

In October 2014 it sold about 3,500 of its towers to infrastructure player Solusi Tunas for IDR5.6 trillion ($460 million). The towers were sold for cash with XL leasing them back for 10 years. The company said it used a majority of the proceeds from the sale to pay down debt.

For the first nine months of last year the operator posted a net loss of IDR506 billion ($37.1 million) and revenue for the period fell 4 per cent to IDR16.98 trillion year-on-year.

It also has seen its market share drop from 18 per cent to 12 per cent over the past year as mobile connections plunged by 19 million to less than 40 million, according to GSMA Intelligence. It has fallen behind 3 Indonesia, which is now the country’s third largest mobile player by subscribers with almost a 16 per cent market share.