FTSE 100 giant Vodafone raises £1.4bn from Indus Towers stake sale to pay debt
Vodafone has raised €1.7bn (£1.4bn) through a sale of nearly 485m shares, or an 18 per cent stake, in Indian telecoms giant Indus Towers.
The money will mostly go towards paying off Vodafone’s €1.8bn (£1.5bn) debt related to its assets in India. It currently has a net debt of INR2.2t (£20.7bn).
Vodafone has been steadily selling off its Indus Towers stake since early 2022. The latest sale leaves the multinational telecoms firm with 82.5m shares in Indus, a shareholding of just over three per cent.
Indus builds and maintains the physical towers that allow mobile network operators to deliver wireless services to customers.
Vodafone Idea, the operator’s local unit, is behind on tower payments by up to INR100bn (£942m), reportedly accounting for around 40 per cent of Indus Towers’ revenue.
Since Vodafone India and Idea Cellular merged to become Vodafone Idea in 2018, the company has lost nearly 200m customers. By the end of 2023, its mobile user base was 215.2m users.
It comes after the company has just completed two big sell offs of its Spanish and Italian units but chief executive Margherita Della Valle recently ruled out any more major deals as part of her strategy to simplify and streamline the telecoms giant.
Vodafone is still waiting to hear back from the competition regulator about whether its proposal to merge its UK operations with those of Three can go ahead.