The French telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel has acquired a 2.5% stake in Vodafone, citing alternatives to speed up a “streamlining” of the London-listed group’s enterprise.
Niel, who based the telecoms firm Iliad, has taken the stake by his funding car Atlas Investissement, which mentioned it was “supportive of Vodafone’s publicly said intention to pursue consolidation alternatives”.
The 55-year previous has spent his profession as “the French Steve Jobs”, disrupting the nation’s established tech and telecoms incumbents whereas constructing an $8bn private fortune.
Not that he wants the cash, his accomplice of greater than a decade is Delphine Arnault, daughter of France’s richest man, Bernard Arnault, and heiress to the huge luxurious conglomerate LVMH that made her father a $154bn fortune.
In February, Vodafone’s chief government, Nick Learn, confirmed it was in talks with rivals in its greatest markets. Learn has argued that the European telecoms business must consolidate to create extra worthwhile companies which are extra enticing to buyers.
That month Vodafone rejected an €11.25bn (£9.8bn) provide from Iliad, additionally owned by Niel, which operates in France, Italy and Poland, for its Italian operation.
Niel’s different enterprise pursuits embody French newspaper Le Monde, which he saved from chapter together with two different excessive profile buyers in 2010. Two years in the past he expanded his media portfolio, shopping for French horse racing paper Paris-Turf, a each day newspaper within the French West Indies and the Good-Matin newspaper group.
He additionally has a five-star lodge in French ski resort Courchevel, and has arrange a profitable tech college that has no lecturers, no books and no charges for 1,000 college students, his enterprise empire is rooted in telecoms.
A couple of years after receiving a Sinclair ZX81 as a Christmas current Niel dropped out of schooling at 19 to create his first enterprise, Minitel, a forerunner of the web that provided sex-oriented chat providers.
Whereas Niel went on to unload most of his pornography pursuits he stored two intercourse outlets which finally would result in a brush with the legislation and a two-year suspended jail sentence for misuse of firm property.
Within the mid-Nineties he invested within the first web supplier in France, promoting out simply earlier than the web bubble burst within the early ’00s, and went on to create his personal firm Iliad.
Iliad is greatest identified for its revolutionary service known as Free, which shook up the French market with free web entry, subsequently developed right into a vastly profitable low-cost broadband and cellular mannequin that Niel has replicated to shake-up markets he has entered along with his telecoms investments.
Final yr, Niel moved to take Iliad non-public due to the “excessive volatility of the telecoms inventory market usually and Iliad’s share worth particularly,” in line with group chief government Thomas Reynaud.
Niel joins the French-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi in focusing on the UK telecoms market. Final yr, Drahi constructed an 18% stake in BT, making him the corporate’s largest investor. In August, the UK authorities dominated that the stake didn’t pose any nationwide safety considerations.
Sweden’s Cevian is one other activist investor that has taken benefit of the weak efficiency of Vodafone shares, which have nearly halved since 2018, build up a stake in January.
In Might, the United Arab Emirates’ greatest telecoms supplier, e&, purchased a 9.8% stake in Vodafone.