ISP TalkTalk Scraps £175m Sale of UK B2B Business to Daisy Group

UK ISP TalkTalk has this afternoon announced a joint agreement “not to proceed with the proposed sale” of their direct B2B business customers to The Daisy Group. The sudden announcement follows a tumultuous week for Daisy (here), which lost its CEO after a failed attempt to sell the business.

The deal (here), which was valued at £175m and included around 80,000 of TalkTalk’s SoHo, SME and large enterprise clients, was originally due to complete in late July 2018. As part of the agreement TalkTalk’s clients would have continued to be served by their network, albeit with the customers themselves being under the ownership of Daisy. Nevertheless this deal has today come to an abrupt halt.

TalkTalk’s Statement

TalkTalk and The Daisy Group have jointly agreed not to proceed with the proposed sale of TalkTalk’s direct B2B business, as announced on 24 May 2018.

TalkTalk will continue to manage all direct B2B business, providing uninterrupted services for customers. FY19 EBITDA guidance remains at the originally stated 15% year-on-year growth (FY18 £233m).

Daisy remains an important, long-term strategic partner for TalkTalk.

The move has had a negative impact on TalkTalk’s share price today, not least because the money they stood to secure could have helped to fund their ambitious £1.5bn project to deploy a new Gigabit capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH/P) broadband network to 3 million UK premises (here).