By Gianluca Lo Nostro and Dominique Patton
PARIS (Reuters) -Bouygues Telecom, Free-iliad Group and Orange said on Tuesday they had submitted a nonbinding offer to acquire a large part of Altice’s activities in France for a total enterprise value of 17 billion euros ($19.72 billion).
Europe’s highly fragmented telecoms sector has been consolidating. The nonbinding bid by Bouygues, Iliad and Orange would be the region’s second-biggest deal this year after Keurig Dr Pepper’s takeover of JDE Peet’s.
The bid covers most of Altice-owned operator SFR’s assets, but excludes stakes in Intelcia, UltraEdge, XP Fibre and Altice Technical Services, as well as the Altice group’s activities in French overseas departments and regions, the companies said in a statement.
The split of price and value is expected to be around 43% for Bouygues Telecom, 30% for Free-iliad Group and 27% for Orange, the companies said. Under the proposal, SFR’s business to business (B2B) would be shared between Bouygues and Free, while the business to consumer (B2C) as well as infrastructure assets would be taken over by all three suitors.
SFR is France’s second-biggest telecoms provider with more than 19 million mobile subscribers and 6.1 million fibre customers as of June.
France has had four mobile network operators since 2012: Orange, Bouygues, Iliad’s Free, and SFR.
A potential sale of SFR could reduce this number to three if its assets are divided among competitors.
“We think the transaction can go through because otherwise, we wouldn’t have done it,” Bouygues’ group CEO Olivier Roussat told reporters on a conference call.
Asked how soon a binding offer could be made, Roussat said, “perhaps at the end of the first quarter of 2026.” He added that the entire process, including structuring the business among operators, could take over four years.
A person familiar with the matter told Reuters that Orange, the market leader in France, believes it has enough capital to submit offers both for Altice’s assets and the remaining stake in Spanish operator MasOrange it does not hold, because it has a lot of cash at hand.
Earlier in October, Altice France closed its 24 billion-euro debt restructuring, which was expected to pave the way for a sale of its telecoms unit SFR.
Bouygues’ U.S.-listed American Depositary Receipts were trading up 2.6% at $9.03.
($1 = 0.8619 euro)
(Reporting by Makini Brice and Dominique Patton in Paris and Gianluca Lo Nostro in Gdanks; Additional reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak in New York; Editing by Chris Reese and Matthew Lewis)
