Vodacom Group completes purchase of 55% stake in Vodafone Egypt

Vodacom Group (Vodacom) today announces that its purchase of a 55% stake in Vodafone Egypt from Vodafone Group has cleared all outstanding regulatory and procedural hurdles, making this transformational deal unconditional and officially completed. Vodacom expects to consolidate Vodafone Egypt into its financial statements over the remainder of the financial year.

In November last year, Vodacom announced an agreement to acquire 55% of Vodafone Egypt for an equity consideration of circa R48.1 billion (US$2.738 billion), which has now been successfully settled through the issuance of 241 976 243 new Vodacom Group shares and a cash consideration of circa R10.8 billion. As a result, Vodafone’s shareholding in Vodacom increases from 60.5% to 65.1%.

Commenting on the development, Shameel Joosub, Vodacom Group Chief Executive Officer, said: “This is an important milestone for Vodacom Group as it will cement our position as a leading pan-African Technology company in addition to diversifying and accelerating our growth profile. We are ideally positioned to partner with Vodafone Egypt to unlock the massive addressable market opportunity in Egypt, supporting and accelerating financial and digital inclusion.”

The acquisition of Vodafone Egypt, one of Africa’s premier telecom operators, is a unique opportunity to advance Vodacom’s strategic connectivity and financial services ambitions. Vodafone Egypt is a clear market leader, strategically positioned to capture growth in a fast-growing Information and Communications Technology (ICT) market. Vodafone Egypt recently delivered strong interim results with local currency service revenue growth of 18.6%.

“In addition to being an attractive asset on a standalone basis, we will seek to leverage our financial services product roadmap, including our super-app approach, to accelerate Vodafone Egypt’s financial services opportunity. We also see upside from cross pollination between Vodafone Egypt’s software factory and our big data capabilities and closer cooperation between both companies by scaling pan-African enterprise and IoT solutions,” concludes Joosub.

Vodacom will provide an update on its medium-term growth outlook with its next quarterly trading update, which will be published on 31 January 2023.