United Group has unofficially denied that it plans to sell the mobile operator Telemach.
According to N1, which is also owned by the group, speculation about a sale first appeared in the Slovenian publication Finance and then spread to other countries. However, it seems that the truth is significantly different. United Group says they are not selling Telemach, but finding a way to generate additional income from the underlying infrastructure.
“In line with current market practice, we plan to monetise our mobile base station infrastructure in some of the countries in which United Group operates, including Croatia”.
The group is actually doing what many of the world’s telecommunications giants have already done, which is reducing their level of leverage.
Quoting Drazen Tomic, editor-in-chief of ICTbusiness.info, it adds: “Other telecoms in the world are doing it, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom and Telekom Austria, A1 Croatia, HT (Hrvatski Telekom) will probably do it at some point, considering that DT has already started doing it, Telecom Italia, British Telecom , in America it is actually a normal thing that everyone uses the same steel infrastructure on which base stations are placed”.
United Group points out that they are one of the few European telecommunications companies that own almost 100% of their own mobile and landline networks. In accordance with world practice, they say that at the end of 2021 they already started the process of separating the towers into the United Towers company.
With this allocation, it plans to generate income to reduce the level of indebtedness, primarily for easier debt repayment of a total of slightly more than €1 billion, which is due in two installments in 2024 and 2025.
