Vodafone, one of Europe’s biggest mobile operators, has made a formal offer to buy up the assets of Cable & Wireless Worldwide for £1 billion ($1.7 billion), a deal that catapults Vodafone into running its own fixed line network in the UK and specifically will give it a much bigger view on to winning enterprise business – a big challenge to BT, TechCrunch reports.
Cable & Wireless, once one of the biggest operators in Europe, has fallen on hard times more recently and has run through three chief executives since a restructuring in 2010.
The deal opens a new opportunity for Vodafone to offer networking services for enterprises, which form the core of C&W’s customer base at the moment, but as Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao noted in the statement Vodafone could also use C&W’s extensive international network to offload its mobile network traffic in other markets and serve enterprises outside the UK, too.
It will also give Vodafone its first crack at owning a broadband network: that could mean more consumer services from the carrier, too, to compete against incumbent operator BT.
Cable & Wireless is one of the UK’s oldest carriers. The company was first established from a number of international telegraph assets and in the 1980s became the first carrier to offer a competitive service to BT in the UK.
At the moment around one-third of C&W’s revenues come from its international operations, which extend across the UK, Asia Pacific, India, Middle East & Africa, Europe and North America.
