Apax is reportedly planning to acquire all shares of the Dutch telecom provider Odido. The investment firm currently owns half of the shares. Warburg Pincus owns the remaining shares.
Apax and Warburg Pincus each own half of Odido. According to insiders who spoke with the Financial Times, the investment firm is now close to a deal to acquire the other half. Those same sources emphasize that the talks could still fall through, and none of the parties involved would comment on the rumors.
The 6.5 billion euro valuation is significantly higher than what the two investors paid in 2022. At that time, they purchased the provider for 5.1 billion euros from Deutsche Telekom and the Swedish company Tele2. Odido was still known as T-Mobile Nederland at the time, and it rebranded to Odido in 2023, along with a completely new range of subscription plans.
IPO was put on hold earlier this year
The deal comes months after the IPO plans fell through. Reuters reported in February that Odido postponed its Amsterdam IPO after a lukewarm investor response and concerns about market volatility. It was supposed to be one of the year’s largest European IPOs.
That same week, it was revealed that Odido had been hit by a major cyberattack. Data from millions of customers ended up online. The attack was carried out through social engineering, which breached the provider’s Salesforce environment. Odido refused to pay the ransom, after which the attackers published the entire dataset of 6.5 million customers. The company’s CEO publicly apologized.
Since then, more suitors have entered the fray. According to the FT, among the interested parties was STC, the state-backed telecom group from Saudi Arabia.
Broadband offers room for growth
Odido posted nearly 2.4 billion euros in revenue last year and, with more than 7.5 million customers, is the largest mobile provider in the Netherlands. In terms of data usage, this accounts for over 50 percent of all mobile data traffic.
The picture is different in fixed-line services. There, KPN and VodafoneZiggo are still clearly larger. According to broadband market figures, KPN holds a 36.8 percent share, VodafoneZiggo 34.8 percent, and Odido 15.2 percent. This is precisely where Apax and Warburg have focused their efforts in recent years.
It is not known what Apax plans to do following a potential acquisition. The transaction would follow shortly after a similar change in ownership at VodafoneZiggo. That provider was incorporated into the Ziggo Group, in which Liberty Global acquired a 90 percent stake. Liberty paid Vodafone 1 billion euros to acquire a majority stake.