After a nightmarish period for Optus, its Singapore-based owner Singtel looks to offload its ownership in Optus in part or even in full.
👉 Background: Optus is the second biggest telco network in Australia with over 10 million customers. And while Optus strictly serves the Australian market, its been owned by Singapore-based Singtel since 2001.
👉 What happened: Now, Singtel is looking to offload its ownership in Optus in part or even in full. There are rumours swirling that a private equity player named Brookfield may just swoop on Optus for a lazy $16 billion to $18 billion.
👉 What else: This has come after Optus' recent nightmarish period. There was the cyberattack which leaked the data of 9.8 million customers. And the major outage last year, which cost Optus $61 million. So, it seems that Singtel is looking to divest expensive assets to its boost profits.
💡Divesting assets is how companies slim down and keep just their best bits. Think of divesting a company like holding a massive yard sale, but instead old lamps and vintage jeans, they're letting go of parts of their business.
💡Companies hold these corporate garage sales for a number of reasons—but for Singtel, it's come after seeing a net profit drop of 12.5% in the December quarter. As a result, Singtel has sold $711 million USD worth of its shares in Indian telco Bharti Airtel.
💡Singtel has also sold down more than $8 billion Singapore dollars worth of capital since 2021 to reduce its debt. These selloffs will also help stabilise its cash balance.
Sign up for Flux and join 100,000 members of the Flux family
