BT Group Finally Sells Italian Division to Telecoms Provider Retelit
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.
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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).
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.
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Another British company selling itself piecemeal. When will UK PLC learn that they need to grow and do things properly rather than cutting and running at the first chance.
BT has had a stake in the company that is now BT Italy since 1995.
You have a strange definition of ‘cutting and running at the first opportunity.’
As an aside – what generally happens to companies that keep hold of perpetually loss-making subsidiaries at all costs?
That ‘British’ company you speak of is already ~55% foreign owned. Most of that to India, China and Germany. What difference does it make if we let the Italians and Spanish have a bit of it? 🙂
British? LOL, the only thing that is British is that is it based in the U.K and have British in its name.
I would love to support British companies, but not many left now.
Fred, they the sold the part that had been fraudulently overstating it’s revenue for years (possibly since before BT acquired it) resulting in years of court cases and reputational damage. BTW the ‘undisclosed sum’ is likely close to zero.