BARCELONA, Nov 14 (Reuters) - Telecom Italia (TIM)
plans to sell a stake in the mobile mast business it is creating
in Italy with rival Vodafone to infrastructure funds,
the Italian group's chief executive said on Thursday.
The two companies agreed in July to merge their Italian
mobile assets under the INWIT business that is currently
60%-owned by TIM. The deal is awaiting European Union antitrust
approval and is expected to wrap up in the first half of 2020,
INWIT's chief executive said last week.
After the deal, TIM and Vodafone will each have 37.5% stakes
in the enlarged INWIT, but have agreed they can jointly reduce
their respective holdings to a minimum of 25%.
"We would like to sell a stake to infrastructure funds," TIM
Chief Executive Luigi Gubitosi told the Morgan Stanley European
Technology Media and Telecoms conference in Barcelona.
Due to currently low returns on bond markets, "there is a
large pool of investment moving to alternative investment, so
infrastructure funds have plenty of money to deploy," he said.
Communications masts have long been popular among
institutional investors because of their steady cash flows.
The deal between Telecom Italia and Vodafone highlights
increasing appetite among operators to share or sell parts of
their infrastructure to help cut debt and free up cash for
investment in the roll-out of next generation 5G networks.
(Reporting by Isla Binnie
Additional reporting by Elvira Pollina in Milan; Editing by
Elaine Hardcastle)