Never satisfied, Xavier Niel acquired 2.5% of the capital of the British operator Vodafone, all through Atlas Investissement, a fund owned by the founder of Iliad and Free.
What could Xavier Niel have in mind to invest in one of the British and global telecommunications heavyweights that is Vodafone? The billionaire is now a shareholder of Vodafone, up to 2.5% of the capital of the British operator. An investment far from trivial.
Xavier Niel, revengeful, takes his share at Vodafone
It’s a real victory for Xavier Niel. At the start of the year, Iliad had tried to take over Vodafone Italia, the transalpine subsidiary of the Newbury group. Xavier Niel would thus have been at the head of two operators in Italy. But its offer (11 billion euros, from Iliad and the Apax fund) was refused by Vodafone, which did not consider it up to par.
So after this failure, what could be better for Xavier Niel than to enter directly into the capital of the parent company? The founder of Iliad offered himself 2.5% of the capital of the British company, via Atlas Investissement, a financial vehicle which is a subsidiary held by NJJ Holding, also owned by Xavier Niel.
The investment in Vodafone should cost Xavier Niel a trifle of 750 million pounds, or around 860 million euros. The Vodafone group, listed on the London Stock Exchange, is worth just over 30 billion pounds (around 34 billion euros), and generated 11.6 billion pounds (13.3 billion euros) in sales figures. business in the previous quarter. This is more than the Orange group (10.6 billion euros) for example.
Weigh in on the orientation of the British group
So officially, this stake in Vodagone was identified by Atlas Investissement as ” an interesting opportunity (…), given the quality of its assets and the strong trends (…) of the global telecommunications sector “. The investment company obviously bounces back on recent statements by the Vodafone group, which said it was looking for consolidation opportunities in selected geographical areas and wanted to continue its efforts to separate infrastructures.
Vodafone, which is looking to cut costs, improve profitability and further expand in Germany, has already walked the talk, parting ways with its subsidiary in Hungary for 1.8 billion euros. Same in New Zealand this summer. And Vodafone’s subsidiary, Vantage Towers, which owns 83,000 mobile phone towers in 10 different countries, could open up its capital quite widely to investment funds.
Xavier Niel, present on the French, Italian, Polish, Monegasque, Swiss and other markets, now has a foothold in the lands of King Charles III. Above all, it will have a certain weight (not to be neglected) on the direction taken by Vodafone. But he also followed in the footsteps of another powerful French telecom mogul, Patrick Drahi. The co-founder of Altice Europe and owner of SFR owns 18% of the BT group, the historic British telecom operator.
Sources: Investment Atlas, The echoes
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