TalkTalk Telecom, the phone and broadband supplier, last year, declined a takeover offer for 135p per share, which is close to around double the current share price of the company, by the major investor Toscafund.
Toscafund is currently a second-biggest investor in the company with 29% shareholding and offered a deal worth 1.5 billion euro to privatise the phone broadband organisation fully. However, the proposal was rejected by TalkTalk leading board member, Charles Dunstone, citing that the offer did not provide sufficient or fair value to its stakeholders.
Toscafund, London-based asset management firm, is led by the investment tycoon Martin Hughes and owned around 19% of the stake in the company at the time of the proposal and increased it to 29% with the time, which is at the edge to the shareholding stake of Charles Dunstone, who owns 30% of the company.
Currently, the FTSE 250 firm, TalkTalk has a market cap of around 900M euro as compared to last year’s 1.5 billion euro. The company recently sold its fibre infrastructure business to CityFibre Holdings. However, TalkTalk still has more than 4 million consumer base across all its range of services. The firm says that it has so far overcome the pandemic despite trading restrictions and shut of live sports for many months through cost reduction.
Another notable merger and takeover in the telecom industry were of Liberty Global Virgin Media with O2, Spain Telefonica’s mobile network, which was a huge deal worth 31 billion euros.
Meanwhile, a Toscafund spokesperson said that it fully understands the TalkTalk board’s decision of declining the offer and is supportive of them and the management. He further added that the TalkTalk is in a better position now as compared to 2019, and the asset management company is further looking forward to upcoming takeover offers for the broadband firm.