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Telecoms and broadband giant BT Group, which is primarily focused upon and based in the United Kingdom, has continued efforts to reduce their international operations this week by announcing a “preliminary” agreement to sell their sometimes troubled Italian business (BT Italia S.p.A) to Retelit for an undisclosed sum.
The unit being sold, which focused on business-to-business services, generated revenues of approximately €160m (£136m) in 2024. The deal is expected to “significantly enhance” Retelit’s fibre optic network by an additional 11,500km, resulting in a total network span exceeding 47,000km. It will also expand Retelit’s national data centre infrastructure by an additional 10MW of power capacity.
In recent years BT has scaled back its operations in Italy, which in 2017 suffered an accounting scandal (a court recently cleared BT Italia itself of wrongdoing, but convicted eight employees). It sold off some parts of the business to former national monopoly Telecom Italia (TIM) in 2021 and has previously done other deals with Retelit, which arguably laid some of the groundwork for this week’s announcement.
Back in 2023 BT also cut a significant amount of jobs from its Italian business, and we suspect BT Group’s CEO, Allison Kirkby, will be pleased to see the back of it.
Retelit Statement
This expansion will further strengthen Retelit’s coverage of the Italian corporate market, providing a more comprehensive suite of ICT infrastructure and services to support the innovation and the digital transformation of Italian enterprises.
The over 360 existing domestic business clients of BT in Italy transitioning to Retelit will benefit from a dynamic, B2B-focused organization that consistently invests in its assets, technology platforms, expertise, and service quality. Retelit possesses a proprietary infrastructure platform integrating network, data centers, and cloud capabilities, which currently stands as one of the most complete in Italy.
The agreement is still subject to approval by the relevant authorities. The announcement follows shortly after BT Group announced the acquisition of their Irish wholesale and enterprise business unit – ‘BT Communications Ireland Ltd.‘ (BTCIL) – by the Speed Fibre Group (here).