Telia Company made use of its Capital Markets Day last week to highlight the progress it has made on its strategy to focus on its core operations in the Nordic and Baltic regions, noting that it is "well on track on our change journey towards becoming a new generation telco."
According to president and CEO Johan Dennelind, the divestment of Yoigo in Spain and Sergel in Sweden -- both announced last week -- "are proof points of our ambition to increase focus on our core operations. We also remain dedicated to exploring opportunities close to the core, as evidenced by our new service Telia Zone, which we also announced this morning," he said.
Masmovil agreed to buy 100 per cent of Yoigo in a deal it said valued the Spanish mobile operator at €612 million ($689 million), and outlined its plan to create a new fixed and mobile player on what is already a highly converged market.
The company is buying the 76.6 per cent majority stake owned by Telia Company and the remaining shares from local minority shareholders ACS, FCC and Abengoa. Masmovil added that according to Telia's accounting principles, Yoigo has an enterprise value of €625 million.
Telia Company also decided to sell off credit management services (CMS) and debt purchase business Sergel to Marginalen, describing it as a non-core business.
Telia Zone, meanwhile, has been unveiled as a "new digital ecosystem and platform for broadband connections" and represents the company's bid to enter the connected home platform market.
Telia intends to launch the platform by the end of 2016 and said it will enable developers to create new services for its 1.2 million broadband customers via an open API.
The operator added that Telia CoPlay, which has been built for use with music-streaming service Spotify, will be the first service on the new platform. It is also the first service to emerge from the strategic partnership launched with Spotify a year ago.
For more:
- see the Telia Company release
- see the Telia Zone release
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