Vodafone has begun what we predict will be a major restructuring of their assets and direction. For today they announced selling their troubled Japanese subsidiary to Softbank and exited one of the worlds largest and most strategically important market.
Shareholders have been pushing Vodafone to fix their struggling Japanese unit or dump it. Today they dumped it. And with it comes the first of many moves designed to placate shareholders and push up their long struggling share price. They have announced they will return around $10bn to shareholders through a special dividend. That should shut them up for a while.
Next up Vodafone will sell their stake in Verizon Wireless to Verizon for over $50bn (expect that to happen this year). Vodafone will return more money to shareholders and buy back moire shares to boost their price.
Then Vodafone will have to figure out where to go from there. They will be out of the Japanese and US market and will no longer look like the global mobile leader that they were.
Expect them to try and dive deeper into data services (boy they need to do a lot of work) in their maturerer European markets. And expect them to drive growth via investments in developing countries. India and China should feature strongly.
On the bright side Vodafone has a unique opportunity to re-shape their portfolio of assets - on the downside they look distinctly less global and less of an industry leader. That they will need to fix fast if they do not want to begin a long decline to irrelevance.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment