Vodafone has offloaded a 10 per cent stake in Vantage Towers for €1.3 (£1.1bn) as it continues a sell off of assets to reduce its debt.
The FTSE 100 firm sold the stake at €32 (£27) per share, the same price at which it sold a stake in the tower company, which operates tens of thousands of towers across 10 European countries, in November 2022.
This was when a consortium of KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) bought 40 per cent of Oak Holdings, the company that controls Vantage Towers.
Oak Holdings owns just over 89 per cent of Vantage Towers, and Vodafone now holds 44.7 per cent.
It brings Vodafone’s total earnings from selling parts of Vantage Towers to €6.6bn (£5.6bn). The money from the sale will help Vodafone pay down its debt, which has hampered the company‘s growth for some time.
The company said the sale would help it hit its leverage target of 2.25 to 2.75 times earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA).
The sale also achieves the 50:50 joint ownership structure between the consortium of investors and Vodafone that was envisaged when the co-control partnership was first announced in 2022.
At that time, Vodafone chief Nick Read described the deal as a “landmark moment,” allowing his firm to retain co-control and dump Vantage Towers off its balance sheet.
It comes amid a wider sell off of assets for the telecoms giant, which has just completed sell offs of its Italian and Spanish units.
It also recently raised €1.7bn (£1.4bn) through a sale of nearly 485m shares, or an 18 per cent stake, in Indian telecoms giant Indus Towers. Vodafone has been steadily selling off its Indus Towers stake since early 2022.
The firm is waiting for the UK competition authority to decide on a possible merger of its UK operations with Three UK.