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| Edited By: |Source: Reuters |Updated: Mar 30, 2018, 03:41 AM IST
UK telephone operator Vodafone is not ready to sell its 44% stake in French mobile operator SFR, said Thibaud Morin, senior vice-president, M&A, strategy and development at Vivendi.
Vivendi is widely seen as an eager buyer of the stake, especially after it finalizes its agreement to sell its 20% holding in NBC Universal to General Electric for $5.8 billion sometime next year.
"Today because of the crisis they (Vodafone) are no longer excluding the possibility of selling their stake, but they have not yet decided to sell it, at least not to our knowledge," said Morin speaking at an M&A conference in Paris.
Morin declined to say whether Vivendi had hired a bank for the deal, noting that Vivendi had banks with whom it was consulting on a general basis about company strategy.
Vivendi's holding company structure under which it does not wholly own its major divisions, has led investors to apply a 25 to 40% conglomerate discount to its valuation. The company had 11.5 billion euros of debt at the end of June.
The acquisition of SFR would allow Vivendi to call itself a telecom company which it hopes will help its stock market valuation by reducing the conglomerate discount.
