Telenor Splits Off Fiber, Sells Stake

Telenor, the incumbent provider of Norway, has announced a transaction that will create a new fiber provider. The deal will see a consortium led by the private equity group KKR and including the life insurance company and pension fund Oslo Pensjonsforsikring take a 30% stake in the newly established Telenor Fiber AS.

Telenor Fiber will own Telenor’s Norwegian ‘passive fibre assets’, which add up to 130,000km of fiber cable connecting 560,000 homes. Telenor Norway will continue as normal when it comes to customers using that fiber infrastructure from residential to wholesale, presumably with some sort of exclusive lease in place between the two entities although the specific details of that weren’t discussed.

The transaction puts a value of about $3.38B on Telenor Fiber, which presumably means KKR is investing about $1B. The company generated approximately $160M in EBITDA in 2021. If all goes well the process will be completed early next year. Telenor intends to use part of the proceeds for share buybacks.

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Categories: FTTH · ILECs, PTTs · Mergers and Acquisitions