Telecom Italia, Italy’s beleaguered former telephone monopoly, once pitched a plan to buy Apple.
Most tellingly, Telecom Italia now finds itself in the position of needing to sell off its landline network just to get its debt pile under control. The sale would be a transformational deal and, if successful, the first such divestiture for a European carrier. That left Telecom Italia on the sidelines as European rivals embarked on an intense round of industry consolidation. The intervening years have seen a trickling away of sales and earnings, both of which nearly halved over the past decade, as the company’s debt continued to mount.
And competition has heated up in recent years as new players arrive — notably France’s Iliad, which entered the Italian mobile market in 2018, positioning itself as a cutthroat, no-frills specialist and sparking an all-out price war. The US firm is in exclusive talks with Telecom Italia, and the carrier’s board has given CEO Pietro Labriola a mandate to seek an improved, binding offer by 30 September, all of which appears to point towards finalising a deal to pare the company down and alter its future prospects.
That could come through local players such as Milan-based infrastructure fund F2i SGR, which features public entities among its shareholders. Indeed, F2i has already started talks with KKR about an eventual minority stake in the grid, people with knowledge of the matter said last month.Rome holds the right to veto deals involving strategic assets, and the government’s desire to safeguard the carrier’s 40 000 employees means that any offer without state backing would face significant hurdles.