SINGAPORE – Singtel has denied news that it is in talks to sell its Australian unit Optus to a Toronto-headquartered private equity firm for A$16 billion (S$14 billion).
The Australian Financial Review (AFR) reported on March 13 that Singtel is in advanced talks to offload the telco to Brookfield.
Optus, Australia’s second-largest telecommunications group, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Singtel, which acquired it for about $11 billion in 2001.
The AFR article quoted unnamed sources as saying negotiations between Singtel and Brookfield are “well advanced”, and that Brookfield is expected to bring in Canada’s CPP Investment Board as a partner in the deal.
Singtel said in a statement on March 13: “There is no impending deal to offload Optus for the said sum, as reported. Optus remains an integral and strategic part of the Singtel Group and we are committed to Australia for the long term.”
It added that it is focused on improving the resilience of the Optus network and conducting a search for a new chief executive.
Former Optus chief executive officer Kelly Bayer Rosmarin resigned on Nov 20, 2023, a little over a week after a nationwide outage left about 10 million customers without phone or Internet access for 12 hours. The Nov 8 outage hit Optus a little more than a year after it suffered a major cyber attack in which more than two million customers had their personal data breached.
Optus chief financial officer Michael Venter is serving as interim CEO.
AFR first reported that Singtel was in talks to offload Optus in January. Singtel had also rejected this, saying: “Singtel views its stake in Singtel Optus as strategic and believes in the long-term outlook of the Optus business.”
Talk of selling Optus comes after Singtel said on March 7 that it had sold 49 million shares, or a 0.8 per cent stake, in its associate, Indian telco Bharti Airtel, to US-based investment firm GQG Partners.
The deal is estimated to result in gross proceeds of $950 million, noted Singtel, which is undertaking a strategic reset to jump-start growth at the company and to be “more agile, competitive and compelling when bringing solutions to market”, said group CEO Yuen Kuan Moon in April 2023.
That pivot began in 2021, when the telco spun off its information and communications technology and digital services arm NCS, enabling it to expand more quickly into the Asia-Pacific as an autonomous business unit.
Shares of Singtel, trading of which was halted earlier on March 13 pending its statement on Optus, resumed trading later in the day and closed up 3.8 per cent at $2.48.
