French telecom company Altice SA reported over the weekend that the race to control Portugal Telecom is over as PT's Brazilan owners had agreed to 'exclusive talks' over the detail of the Altice €7.4 billion offer.
This exclusivity agreement ends the race for Isabel dos Santos, businesswoman and daughter of Angola’s dictator, who has been left at the altar, as have been the private equity bidders Apax Partners and Bain Capital which had hoped to make a killing on the upside when PT is sorted out and ready for resale.
Entrepreneur Patrick Drahi runs Altice and sees a clear way forward with PT by slicing costs from the old state owned enterprise and offering mobile, broadband, fixed telephony and television services as a bundle; this is where the profit lies alongside cost reductions.
Altice already owns Cabovisão and Oni in Portugal but with the PT deal the company, based in Luxembourg, will be head to head with NOS and Vodafone.
Altice claims its PT Portugal offer is backed by arranged finance and existing reserves but holds back €500 million which depends on ‘future revenue generation’ from PT. The successful Altice offer PT comes only days after the company completed the €18 billion acquisition of French telecom company SFR.
Who is Patrick Drahi?
Patrick Drahi joined the Forbes Billionaires list in 2015 with an estimated $11 billion fortune after Altice, the multinational telecommunications company he founded, raised $1.8 billion in a January 2014 Amsterdam IPO.
Following a buy-low, sell high mantra, he built Altice through 20 acquisitions of lagging cable and mobile operators, often at knockdown prices in places like France, Belgium, Israel, Portugal, and the Dominican Republic.
More than 40% of Altice's revenues comes from France while 27% comes from Israel.
The son of two math teachers, he was born in Morocco and lived there for 15 years. He holds an engineering degree from the Parisian university École Polytechnique and lives in Geneva with his wife and four children.
