The radio tower provider operates 82,000 locations in Europe.
(Photo: Bloomberg)
Dusseldorf The Vodafone radio tower company Vantage Towers loses its head of Germany. Peter Zehetner, Managing Director Germany, will leave the company, as two people familiar with the process confirmed to the Handelsblatt. Vantage Towers left a request about the departure unanswered.
Vodafone had put its radio tower division on the Frankfurt stock exchange in March. Since then, the company has gained around 20 percent in its rating. Vantage Towers now has a market capitalization of more than 15 billion euros. The company has around 82,000 cell phone sites in Europe.
In Germany, however, a dispute over the direction of Vantange Towers has broken out, as several insiders reported. In total, Vantage Towers has more than 19,000 locations in Germany. At most locations, only Vodafone uses the infrastructure. Vantage has an average usage of 1.2 providers per location. For comparison: in countries like Great Britain, an average of two customers already use each location.
More customers also means more income. It is therefore the declared goal of Vantage Towers CEO Vivek Badrinath to quickly acquire new customers in countries like Germany. Talks are in progress with the newcomer to mobile communications 1 & 1. “It’s fair to say that our involvement with 1 & 1 is extremely important to us,” Badrinath recently told analysts.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
The Vantage Towers locations could help 1 & 1 to set up their own network. The talks are not yet over.
Vodafone is under pressure
A 1 & 1 spokeswoman confirmed that the mobile phone company was in discussion with radio tower providers. “We are talking to three providers and hope to reach an agreement soon,” said the spokeswoman.
If Vantage Towers wins the bid, the radio tower operator would actively strengthen a direct competitor of Vodafone. About the correct handling of 1 & 1 as a possible new customer on the Vantage radio towers, there should have been a dispute between Zehetner and CEO Badrinath, among other things.
Zehetner is a seasoned manager in the wireless industry. He worked for the Swedish network supplier Ericsson for more than 26 years before moving to Vantage Towers at the beginning of 2021.
Vodafone is under pressure in mobile communications in Germany. For many years, the provider was clearly number two on the German market in terms of service revenues in mobile communications: behind the market leader Deutsche Telekom, but well ahead of its competitor Telefónica (O2 brand). In the meantime, Vodafone has fallen back to last place.
In the third quarter of this year, the Telekom brought it to 1.6 billion euros in service revenues in mobile communications. This is followed by Telefónica (brand O2) with 1.42 billion euros and Vodafone in third place with 1.29 billion euros.
The gap between Vodafone and its rivals has recently become even greater. In the past quarter, the growth in service revenues in mobile communications at Vodafone was only 0.8 percent. At Telekom it was two percent, and at Telefónica, service revenues grew by as much as 4.4 percent.
More: 1 & 1 wants to put the competition under pressure with a new technology when building the 5G network. Group boss Dommermuth is also taking a risk