Hamburg The British telecommunications group Vodafone is selling a significant part of its own radio tower infrastructure in order to reduce debt. The company announced this on Wednesday morning. The US private equity investor Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) and the infrastructure fund GIP are to become new owners of a 50 percent stake.
Vodafone had outsourced the radio tower division to the subsidiary Vantage Towers in 2019 and floated it on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in March 2021. A good year and a half later, the British want to take Vantage off the floor again – together with the new partners.
Vodafone currently holds around 81.7 percent of Vantage shares. Vodafone now wants to bring this into the Oak Bidco joint venture, in which the company will have a stake of at least 50 percent. The partners KKR and GIP are said to hold a similarly high stake. The holding company will then offer the remaining shareholders 32 euros per Vantage share in order to take all shares off the market, it said. The Handelsblatt had already reported on the sales negotiations in October.
Vantage Towers to grow under new consortium
KKR and GIP announced that they want to advance Vantage’s expansion plans. “Our common goal is to further grow the business and thereby create a pan-European market leader in the field of telecommunications,” said KKR partner Vincent Policard. Vantage CEO Vivek Badrinath spoke of wanting to “tackle the next growth phase for the company” together.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
Vantage, which is managed from Düsseldorf, has been struggling with problems since it was founded: Vantage was recently unable to deliver the agreed number of locations on time to the German customer 1&1, who is currently building a new 5G network. Several executives had previously left the company.
>> Read also: Dead spots and slow internet – telecom companies are likely to violate regulations again
With the partial sale, Vodafone loses sole control over an essential part of its infrastructure, but makes a lot of money: up to 7.1 billion euros could flow to the group, according to a statement.
Vantage is valued at up to 16 billion euros
The group’s management in London wants to use the income to reduce the high level of debt in order to regain room for manoeuvre. Vantage is currently valued at around 16 billion euros on the stock exchange.
Vodafone boss Nick Read also discussed a takeover of Telefónica’s stake in Cornerstone Towers, a British cell tower operator. The Spanish telecom group put its 50 percent stake up for grabs a few days ago. The other half is held by the cable company Liberty Global.
Telekom has already sold the majority of GD Towers
The cell phone tower business is considered attractive and promises investors stable profits. Against this background, a wave of consolidation is rolling through the industry. In the summer, Deutsche Telekom sold the majority of its subsidiary GD Towers. In this business, too, KKR was considered an interested party until the very end.
Analysts played through a merger of GD and Vantage in the past few months. They also named INWIT from Italy as a possible partner for Vantage. Its shares rose by up to three percent in Milan in response to the news. Vantage titles gained almost twelve percent at the top to 32.72 euros and headed for the largest daily gain since the IPO about a year and a half ago.
More: Vodafone is planning billion-dollar deals with radio towers and fiber optics