‘We are done’: Vodafone chief rules out more big deals after offloading Spanish and Italian arms
The chief executive of Vodafone has ruled out any more major deals as part of her strategy to simplify the sprawling telecoms giant and improve shareholder returns.
Margherita Della Valle, a veteran of the FTSE 100 firm who became its CEO in January 2023, shot down the suggestion of more big carve-outs and mergers after ditching its Italian and Spanish arms.
“No, we are done,” she told The Sunday Times. “When I became CEO, I said we had three markets to sort out.”
During Della Valle’s 17-month tenure, Vodafone has completed the sale of its Spanish business to UK investment firm Zegona for €5bn (£4.3bn) and struck a deal to offload its Italian arm for €8bn (£6.8bn) to Bern-based Swisscom.
Meanwhile, a proposed merger of its UK business with Three UK is awaiting regulatory approval, with the Competition and Markets Authority worried it could leave consumers worse off and impede competition in the telecoms market.
Della Valle has also laid out plans to cut 11,000 jobs as she looks to turn around the company’s fortunes and boost its flagging share price after a tough few years that have seen a highly competitive market, heavy debts, tight regulation and dividend cuts drag on the stock.
She has previous described Vodafone’s sluggish performance in Germany as “unacceptable”. This year, the firm is set to lose roughly half of the 8.5m TV customers who live in so-called “multi-dwelling units” due to a new law preventing landlords from bundling TV services into rental agreements.
Many of the job cuts have impacted Vodafone’s “shared operations” arm, which provides back-office services like IT. Della Valle said she wanted to shift workloads and “accountability” to leaders of international divisions to avoid “ping-pong decision-making”.
Della Valle said she was a “glass-half-empty CEO” and never “completely satisfied about what we do and especially what I do”.
“We are a very different company today than we were a year ago,” she added. “But we are not yet a simple business. We are simpler, but there is more to come.”