Mobile Operator Lebara Sold to Waterland Private Equity
Alchemy has this morning announced that they’re selling their Pan-European mobile operator business, LebaraGroup B.V, to Waterland Private Equity for an undisclosed sum. In the UK, Lebara is a virtual mobile operator (MVNO) that harnesses Vodafone’s national network to deliver 4G and 5G services (calls, text and mobile broadband).
Lebara currently offers similar mobile services to 4.4 million subscribers (up from 2.4m in 2019) across the UK, Netherlands, Germany, France and Denmark. Alchemy’s journey with Lebara began in 2018 when, following a “period of underperformance under prior ownership“, they identified an opportunity to acquire the business and have since led it through a period of transformation.
The business’ profitability and customer base has broadly doubled during Alchemy’s ownership, but now the reins are being passed to a new home.
Advertisement
Ian Cash and Alex Leicester of Alchemy said:
“Stephen and his team have done a fabulous job at repositioning Lebara and delivering substantial growth for the business, particularly in the UK where Lebara is the fastest growing player in the mobile telecommunications value segment.
The business has been truly transformed since our first investment in 2018 and we are grateful to Stephen and the team for their outstanding contribution to Lebara over the last 4 years – they have been a pleasure to work with. We have no doubt that Lebara will continue to go from strength to strength over the coming years under Waterland’s ownership.”
Stephen Shurrock, CEO of Lebara, said:
“It has also been our pleasure to work with Alchemy over the last few years. They have been hugely supportive of the Lebara turnaround, and have invested in the company to achieve significant growth. With Alchemy’s investment Lebara has repositioned itself and now has the latest digital platform, a focus on customer experience and is one of the fastest growing mobile businesses in Europe. They have also invested in people and upskilling the business.
Today Lebara is a strong business with a leading management team that will continue the strong growth story into the future. On a personal level I would like to say a big ‘Thank You’ to Alchemy, their trust, support and encouragement has meant a lot to me and the management team as we have worked through the company transformation.”
The sale, which is pending regulatory approval, is aiming to deliver a strong return on investment for Alchemy’s investors.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
« Telecom Acquisitions Gobbles Remaining UK Gigabit Networks Customers
Prediction: Waterland PE will transfer the debt accumulated when buying Lebara to the company, borrow more to fund dividends back to Waterland, put up prices to try and service the debt then lose customers to cheaper competitors resulting in Lebara going bust.
Bit of shame as they have been very good during the 3+ years I’ve been with them, but there is always an alternative. Really the fault lies with the fixed income investors that are prepared to lend to highly-leveraged companies that then reduce equity by taking huge dividends.
Hopefully Waterland might be one of the better PE companies and prove me wrong!
These were my concerns as well when I read this.
Usually the customer service function takes a hit which, for my Lebara account, has been excellent.
Although, much of my interaction has been via the well designed App and Website.
I was delighted to see the very competitive international roaming rates as a recent addition which made it a no brainer for my wife currently travelling around Canada. No roaming SIM (with an alternative number) is now required. SO convenient for a relatively small cost.
Customer service was already pretty poor and overseas… But that’s sadly the norm these days
The private equity model is so predictable that it’s simply a copy and paste model of how to ruin companies and yet we allow this to continue. The worst form of capitalism there is and the very definition of ensh*tification.
Lebara was great. I suppose it’s only a matter of time before I jump ship
Lebara has a USP of including an amount of international minutes in all of their bundles. The people who rely on this will be reluctant to jump ship – unless it gets way too expensive.
Lebara has built up quite a reputation amongst penny-pinchers like me on the HotUKDeals forum, with super-cheap deals only available via their affiliates. Their latest deal is £1/mth for unlimited calls and texts, and 35GB data, for the first seven months. Droves of us repeatedly join, leave and re-join to take advantage of their offers.
Seems like this has been an exercise in increasing their customers to sweeten a sale of the company.
Been a Lebara customer for several years, like others here making the best of their frequent introductory deals, loved their 1p deals of old! Hope the change of owner doesn’t alter their consumer offerings.
I’ve been using the Lebara £1 a month offer deals for the past few years, it has been brilliant.
The app has improved significantly. For what I pay and the return I get, I think it is great, plenty of positives not many negatives. One way Lebara could be better is by implementing esims.
If Lebara keep the ongoing pricing and EU roaming I’d still stay at the current full prices. They are competitive enough, especially at the lower end.
I’d expect the intro offers to disappear especially for people cycling numbers as there’s less need to try to show new customer acquisition (which people doing porting still show as…) or growth. That wasn’t sustainable anyway, whatever, not bothered about that. But I think they’ll try to raise other prices too in time which is more concerning.
Worrying time for UK mobile really especially with Three-Vodafone merger and investors pushing for Curry’s to potentially sell iD as well.
And a ripe time to remove EU roaming too. That’s a bigger death nail for me than the pricing but not sure how many other customers are in the same mind. TalkMobile changed their mind which was positive but if it’s yield not new customers who knows…