BT to Sell Stake in Global Unit?

That’s today’s news from Bloomberg. The UK incumbent BT Group is taking steps that could lead to the sale of all or part of the company’s international business. According to the article, they have reached out to AT&T and Orange to talk about possible transactions.

BT Global’s revenue is about 11% of the company’s total at about £2.4 for 2023, enabling BT to serve a wide range of international needs of UK-based businesses. Yet, the unit has struggled to keep up with the rest of the company in terms of growth, suffering declines in both revenue and earnings. But that’s still quite a prize in terms of scale in the global networking business if the price is right.

Orange and AT&T are obvious possible suitors, given that they serve similar customer types from bases in the US and France, but there are others. I’d bet that T-Systems, Telefonica, Verizon Business, NTT, Arelion, and GTT might want a seat at that table. And that doesn’t even begin to look at the money guys who might want to take the reins as a turnaround project.

The hard part would be coming up with the structure of such a deal, carving out assets and operations from BT as a whole in a way that works for everyone. In fact, I’ll bet the talks don’t go anywhere quickly.

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Categories: Managed Services · Mergers and Acquisitions