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New entrant 88.61 please
Would love for it to be higher but I think we'll grind upwards quite slowly until more solid news flow.
Thanks
Anyone have any thoughts on who may become the new CEO?
Olaf Swantee
"Chairman
T-Mobile Nederland
Apr 2022 - Present · 9 mos
The Hague, South Holland, Netherlands"
"Chairman
mobilezone
Apr 2021 - Present · 1 yr 9 mos"
"Executive Chairman
Community Fibre Limited
Aug 2020 - Present · 2 yrs 5 mos
London, United Kingdom"
Plus other roles too, not sure he'd have the time to run Vodafone.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/olaf-swantee-9912a759/
Nick Jeffery
Currently CEO of Frontier Communications, will he want to leave Frontier to become CEO of Vodafone?
"CEO & President: Frontier Communications
Frontier Communications · Full-time
Mar 2021 - Present · 1 yr 10 mos"
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-jeffery-ba05b72/
Ronan Dunne is currently a non executive Director at M&S.
Previously:
Verizon
Executive Vice President & Chief Executive Officer
6 yrs 1 mo
Strategic Advisor to the CEO
Full-time
Jan 2022 - Sep 2022 · 9 mos
New Jersey, United States."
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dunneronan/
https://www.themarque.com/profile/ronan-dunne
Yes ther is an article in the Mail today that explains it all, the BOD's all agreed that Read had to go and they needed more fast action to help the SP.
They agreed action is needed on selling off some parts to bring down debt, more quiker action on making deals happen and it says there is already a short list for Reads replacement. I guess we will have to see how long that takes.
But if all / part of this info is true we could see VOD 's SP recover fast and back over £1.
Can you put me down for the usual £1 thanks......Was a strange week that one.....
86p for me Fri 16th
Based on TA here. 106p if a new CEO that everyone likes is announced next week
https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/VODAFONE-GROUP-PLC-15867071/charts/
Good call sfdc, well done.
71p is my prediction for next Fri 16th.
Why?
I doubled my holding when we hit the 85p TA support level on Thurs.
Average now 91p.
Would prefer SP to rise and exit my trade,
but if we get an RNS reducing the divi,
then wouldn't be surprised to see the SP fall off a cliff
down to the next TA support level (71p).
The board broke the news to senior executives at half-time in the England match so as not to interrupt the game
Was that a joke? Seriously? They also waited for a 2 hour window, wow we are in safe hands when our Board are too wimpish to announce staggering news during a football game. Did they think it would upset the Directors? I mean hardly any are English anyway.
Were you not able to access my article link last night Slownsteady?
Many sell when ex divi and move on.
The link was sufficient, it's one of the few Times articles not hidden behind their paywall.
But it was all too little, too late for Read, who was well liked among staff but lacked the ability to inspire.
Some argue that he tried to turn Vodafone into a global conglomerate and profit from overlaps in different countries. From the global headquarters in Paddington in central London, Read and co oversaw this sprawling jigsaw puzzle. Some believe the Paddington HQ should be shut, leaving just its former headquarters in Newbury, Berkshire.
“A lot of people start out with the experiment of building an international telco, with synergies across multiple countries. It was one of the big bets for Nick,” said a senior industry source.
“But it is proven in the telecoms industry that this doesn’t work. The likes of Telia, Telenor AT&T — everyone has tried in some shape or form to create synergies across countries, and for many reasons it just doesn’t fly.”
Read’s successor will be expected to take a much bolder approach. Finance boss Margherita Della Valle is taking charge temporarily, but the board is more likely to seek an outsider as the permanent chief executive.
The board has already begun approaching potential candidates. Dutchman Olaf Swantee, the former boss of EE and Swiss business Sunrise, is in the running. He had a short stint as a non-executive director at Vodafone last year. Other potential candidates include Allison Kirkby, the BT board director who runs Sweden’s Telia; Virgin Media O2’s chief executive, Lutz Schüler; and Stephen Carter, the Informa boss who is on Vodafone’s board and who ran the industry regulator Ofcom.
Aviva Investors’ Green said: “If the board wants an external candidate, then they could look no further than the template of BT. In recruiting Philip Jansen, they hired an industry outsider with a great track record of delivering for shareholders, which brought some urgency to the company. The status quo is clearly unacceptable to the board and to shareholders, and something more radical is required to turn around the apathy shown by investors for years.”
He said a new chief executive could put pressure on regulators with “bolder” deals and “proper, ground-breaking consolidation”. Green added: “This will require dynamic and bold thinking, where there are no sacred cows and they focus on fewer markets but can achieve higher returns.”
Xavier Niel has always viewed himself as an outsider, but has become a leading figure in French business through his ownership of Iliad, the telecoms giant behind Free mobile.
Niel, 55, was a school dropout who spent his teenage years as a computer hacker, when his talents were spotted by the French security service. Years later, Niel admitted hacking the phone of the late President Mitterrand.
In the 1980s, he helped create Minitel, the computer service dubbed the France-Wide Web. In 2004, he was arrested on charges, in effect, of pimping because he part-owned several sex shops and peep shows. Niel was cleared of the charges but a tax fraud earned him a two-year suspended sent
A few weeks later, Read completed a deal to sell up to 50 per cent of Vodafone’s controlling stake in Vantage Towers, its €14.8 billion mobile phone masts business, through a joint venture. The board had hoped the deal would bolster flagging shareholder sentiment to buoy the company through what they knew would be disappointing financial results being published the following week. The plan failed; the Vantage sale was complex, with strings attached, leaving investors underwhelmed.
When Read then lowered full-year profit guidance a few days later due to the operational blunders in Germany, the shares tumbled and his days were numbered. “The main issue is not actually M&A [mergers and acquisitions], it’s more operations,” said a former senior insider. “Vodafone is not operating at its real potential.”
The debts that the Liberty deal heaped on Vodafone have piled more pressure on it to go further to offload underperforming parts of its sprawling empire.
The largest four parts of the business are: Germany, which makes up nearly a third of group turnover, including fixed-line and mobile; the UK, which generates 14 per cent of turnover; Italy, 11 per cent; and Spain, which makes up 9 per cent.
Vodafone is in talks to create a joint venture with mobile rival Three in the UK, but those discussions are dragging on as a complex structure is thrashed out. It missed out on a deal to beef up in Spain as France’s Orange swooped in to merge with MasMovil in the country. That deal left Vodafone as the smallest of the remaining three mobile operators in Spain. It is now also the third-largest operator in Germany, the UK and Italy, having previously been the largest or second largest in most countries at the peak of its powers two decades ago after its frenetic and ill-fated deals spree.
Now, there are seven other European countries that make up just 13 per cent of revenues: Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Romania, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Albania. There are also three countries that Vodafone defines as “other markets”: Turkey, Ghana and Egypt. It also has a 60 per cent stake in Vodacom, the African business listed in Johannesburg.
“Right off the bat, you’d sell the ten smallest companies which make up 10 per cent of the enterprise value of the business. Those are not small businesses but they’re small in the Vodafone context,” said a rival telecoms executive.
Others point to opportunities to leave far-flung markets such as Australia. The company has been in talks to sell its Ghanaian business since July, but there has been no announcement about a deal. Last week, Bloomberg reported that Etisalat was eyeing Vodafone’s controlling stake in Vodacom.
Read did manage to get some deals over the line. In August, he agreed to sell the Hungarian business for €1.8 billion, while he struck the Vantage deal last month, just a year after floating it in Frankfurt — though this was criticised for being another complex transaction.
“Reviewing the geographical spread to create a focused European footprint, as well as radically improving efficiency, should be the next steps,” he told The Sunday Times. “These actions should return Vodafone to its successful roots as a star European asset, create value for all stakeholders and lead to a revamped equity story.”
He added: “The right candidate must be ready to take action and to rapidly implement significant change to return Vodafone to greatness.”
And after dumping its stake in Vodafone, making a complete exit a couple of months ago, Cevian is already considering a possible return to the shareholder register. A source close to the firm said it continued to see significant long-term potential in a restructuring of Vodafone and could take up the case again.
Read, the former chief financial officer, took over in October 2018 from Vittorio Colao, the Italian who went on to become digital minister in his home country. Colao was hailed for selling Vodafone’s 45 per cent stake in US business Verizon Wireless for $130 billion in 2014, which reaped huge rewards for shareholders.
However, his €18.4 billion takeover of Liberty Global’s cable assets in Germany and central and eastern Europe, just before he stepped down, left Read with a big headache. Not only did it saddle Vodafone with huge debts, which stood at more than €45 billion (£39 billion) at the end of September, but problems soon emerged in the German business.
At the time of the deal in 2018, the German arm was growing at a rate of 5 per cent, making it the jewel in the crown. But then the business hit the buffers and went into reverse. The German fixed-line business makes up a fifth of Vodafone’s entire profits, making it the key cog in the global machine.
One big problem was a new telecoms law in Germany that forced housing associations, with which Vodafone has deals, to stop bundling cable TV in with rental fees. That meant a wave of customers switched off when they weren’t forced to pay for the service. On a call with analysts last month, Read conceded that the company had “dropped the ball” on the new telecoms law.
Trevor Green, head of UK equities at Aviva Investors, a top 15 Vodafone shareholder, said Read had received a “hospital pass” in the form of the Liberty deal, inheriting a “highly indebted business, reducing his strategic options”.
The Liberty deal came just before a Europe-wide race to build fibre for broadband, rather than old-fashioned cable, which led Virgin Media to upgrade its cable network in the UK to fibre. In Germany, Vodafone, too, has had to upgrade its cable network to keep pace with the competition.
Vodafone Deutschland’s chief executive, Hannes Ametsreiter, left in the summer after seven years in charge. He was replaced by Philippe Rogge, a former Microsoft executive. In October, there was a review of the German business that thrashed out a much simpler plan.
A few weeks later, Read completed a deal to sell up to 50 per cent of Vodafone’s
How Vodafone ousted boss Nick Read — and what its activist investor wants next
French tycoon Xavier Niel has laid out his blueprint for the struggling telecoms giant, while investor Cevian eyes a comeback
Sunday December 11 2022, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
As nervous England fans settled into their seats for the team’s knockout game against Senegal last Sunday, Vodafone’s directors assembled in front of their computer screens.
The Belgian chairman of the FTSE 100 telecoms giant, Jean-François van Boxmeer, had called a virtual board meeting and waited for the two-hour slot between France and England’s matches to hold the talks. The former Heineken boss transmitted a simple message to his directors: it was time for the company to hang up on Nick Read, the under-pressure chief executive.
Van Boxmeer had held a discussion with Read a few days earlier in which they agreed a new chief executive was needed to improve the company’s operational performance, speed up deals and, ultimately, revive the ailing share price.
On the virtual call, van Boxmeer’s fellow directors agreed with the verdict and it came as no surprise to anyone who dialled in. The board broke the news to senior executives at half-time in the England match so as not to interrupt the game, before announcing it publicly at 7am the following morning.
The decision brought the curtain down on a 20-year career at Vodafone. However, the final four of those years, when Read was in charge, had become increasingly difficult as he grappled with huge debts and an unwieldy empire on the wane.
Read, 58, was slow to execute on deals in countries such as Spain and the key German division was misfiring. The pressure was also mounting from a new set of vocal investors.
It emerged this year that Cevian Capital, Europe’s largest activist investor, had built up a stake to become a top ten Vodafone shareholder and wanted Read to offload struggling divisions. Then in May, Abu Dhabi’s Etisalat, which recently rebranded as “e&”, bought a near-10 per cent stake for £3.3 billion. The top shareholder said it was confident the company could improve its performance operationally through “other potential strategic transactions”.
A few months later in September, another troublemaker arrived on the register. French telecoms tycoon Xavier Niel snapped up a 2.5 per cent stake worth £750 million through his Atlas Investissement vehicle.
It was the board, rather than the vocal shareholders, who made the final call on Read. But it is those shareholders that are now calling on the new chief to dial up the speed of the deals to simplify Vodafone, whose share price has nearly halved under Read.
This weekend, in a rare set of public comments, Niel said Vodafone had become “too fat, too slow, too complex”. He said it “must move fast” to slim down and slash debt by “selling infrastructure
long time lurker, the gravity pull on Vod this is too much, debt doesn't help, needs a proper positive catalyst. i am bearish long term until things change drastically.
what do i know though, i got caught out in this twice before (Brexit vote, and 18 months ago) , keeping some powder dry for the next leg down.
*SP
Thanks good find. Must admit I thought you were danielh, aka, Glen Miller.
Certainly food for thought. I suppose the question is, does the new ceo adopt the times strategy and concentrate the vod footprint by disposing 10% of the operations and getting rid of the 'small opcos' to pay down debt. As the debt maturity is average 11 years, I assume that means the near term debt to 2030 is tendered for cash leaving the remaing debt less than 2% coupon 2030/2040+. The continuing business presumably grows with economic recovery, german roll out but what about Vodacom and EIA.
Assuming everyone likes the new CEO, the SO should soar?
9th Dec closing SP 86.75p
SFDC 86.5p
Doyen Dan 95.2p
Robleo 91.5p
Aspers 93.6p
Mikey 95p
Exil 92p
Abject 93.05p
Wm2020 93p
Sotonspike 100p
Velo 90p
Kiwitwo 92.5p
GutterS 89p
Fredrubble 92.69p
Sigma 85p
SlartiB 87.8p
Roofer 92.15p
Poker chips
I imagine the bod are in a closed period, given an abscence of a permenant ceo and the tower sale
Hi Pokerchips, where do you suggest looking for an Options Market overview for UK-listed companies. Thx
Accolade goes to another new contestant
"SFDC.meeeeeeee"
"Speech speech " SFDC
Closing SP 86.75p well done
Full list will follow
"Maybe even Fleccy´s Verizon will turn up and save them the trouble :-)"
I realise my talk of a Verizon/Vodafone merger is out there, and I say it with my my tongue slightly in my cheek, but there is a possibility.
My reasoning:
The events leading up to Vodafone's takeover of C&WW, with Gavin Darby being an ex Vodafone executive coming out of nowhere to become CEO, and Vodafone then taking over C&WW in short order.
Colao has recently rejoined the board of Verizon, after previously leaving to go into Italian politics, to the surprise of some.
Dunne left Verizon in 2021 and if he is offered the CEO position it will be reminiscent of the Darby/Vodafone/C&WW series of events.
Tentative view, but not beyond the realms of possibility.
if the Chairman decided to Buy on the lows , I think the market would sink the price lower ......I cant see the City being in any mood to let a Chairman, whom some criticise,get away with buying a low when he may well have played a part in creating the price crash
A new external CEO is gonna take time to speak to all the key stakeholders and get expert opinion etc and maybe then have a CMD ... going to take time
....unless they appoint the interim CEO when the whole thing could progress much quicker
Maybe even Fleccy´s Verizon will turn up and save them the trouble :-)
A lot can be assumed by the lack of any director buys even at todays price of 86p.
Having sold here in the 130’s I am itching to get back in but the lack of current director interest is a biggy for me. If a worthy CEO is put in place with a master plan for addressing VOD’s current issues I can see this getting back to £1 quickly.
Finger hovering over the buy button so come on VOD directors have some faith, spend some of your heavily inflated salaries & back your company. G L All.