Vodafone Portugal may consider acquiring Altice-owned local cableco Cabovisao if price and other conditions are right, its CEO Mario Vaz told local media.
Altice is widely expected to sell local assets such as Cabovisao, and potentially, smaller…
Vodafone Portugal may consider acquiring Altice-owned local cableco Cabovisao if price and other conditions are right, its CEO Mario Vaz told local media.
Altice is widely expected to sell local assets such as Cabovisao, and potentially, smaller fixed-line player Oni, to gain approval for its planned acquisition of PT Portugal.
Spokespeople for both Vodafone Group and Luxembourg-based telecoms holding Altice declined to comment, but a person familiar with Vodafone confirmed the remarks.
“Vodafone has rapidly gained market share, passing the 10% mark in the bundled services,” a Portugal-based analyst said, adding that a deal with Cabovisao would allow the operator to increase its market share by an additional 6 to 7%.
A person familiar with the situation said both Vodafone and larger rival Nos would definitely be interested in Cabovisao, but it would make more sense for Nos to acquire it since both operators use the same technologies, therefore leading to greater synergies.
However, he warned that Nos, which is controlled by Angolan billionaire Isabel dos Santos, could face regulatory hurdles since it would become a dominant player.
At the end of February, the EU competition authority said that Altice had offered a number of undisclosed concessions as part of its previously-announced €7.4bn (US$8.3bn) acquisition of incumbent PT Portugal. The watchdog is due to decide on the deal by 20 April.
Analysts believe that Altice, which also owns small local fixed-line operator Oni, has offered to dispose of its Portuguese assets to get the acquisition cleared.
“The sale of Oni would have a marginal impact on Altice since its market share is very low,” an analyst said.
Altice – which also operates in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Israel and the Caribbean – had agreed to acquire PT Portugal, which comprises Portuguese and Hungarian assets, from Brazilian telco Oi last December.
The Rio de Janeiro-based carrier had inherited the assets following its ill-fated merger with PT, first announced in October 2013, which had aimed to create an integrated telecoms operator for all Portuguese-speaking countries.
However, the deal soured in July 2014 after Rioforte, a unit of collapsed banking group Banco Espirito Santo (BES), defaulted on a nearly €900m debt payment to the Portuguese operator, forcing its holding company -PT SGPS- to reduce its stake in the combined entity from 37.4% to 25.6%.
As of Q3 14, PT held 54.8% of Portugal’s fixed telephony market, followed by Nos (30.5%), Vodafone (8.8%) and Cabovisao (4.7%).
