As part of the new strategic plan that it will present in November, Telefónica is considering the sale of part of its subsidiary Telefónica Tech, in which it concentrates its cybersecurity, cloud, internet of things, Big Data, artificial intelligence and blockchain services.
According to Bloomberg, the company has already met with several investment funds to explore their interest in this subsidiary, whose value may be around 2,000 million euros. Telefónica sources do not comment on this eventual partial divestment.
The Tech division was created as part of the company's strategic plan presented in 2019 and, practically from the moment in which the technological assets were grouped and the segregation process was closed, in 2021, rumors have been repeated about its sale or IPO.
The forecast is that Telefónica will make an announcement about this subsidiary on November 8, at the investors day that it plans to hold to publicize the strategic plan for the period between 2023 and 2026.
The sources consulted indicate that this possible divestment is not related to the entry into the capital of Saudi Telecom, which has expressed its support for the team led by José María Álvarez-Pallete.
Despite its activity in a business as sensitive as cybersecurity, in which there are contracts with the Ministry of Defense, any sale of Tech would not exempt Saudi Telecom from asking the Government for permission to exercise its voting rights for 9.9%. , since the Spanish telecom company has other equally strategic business areas.
The possible partial sale will not be immediate, but is part of the strategy already applied by other large Spanish companies such as Repsol, Naturgy or Telefónica itself to segregate assets in a new company to sell a part.
In the first half of the year, according to Telefónica's latest accounts, the Tech area earned 885 million euros, 40% more than in the same period of the previous year.
Tech's clients include large multinationals such as Microsoft and Amazon. It also develops solutions in artificial intelligence, one of the areas with the most technological potential.
