Sparkle, International Branch of Telecom Italia, On The Block
Retelit and its minority partner the Italian government just made a $700 million Euro bid for Sparkle's subsea cable business. The bid expires January 27th, 2025. More details here . My first impression is that this is not a rousing endorsement of the subsea cable service industry. Sparkle does a billion Euros in annual revenue according to a publicly available corporate presentation with wet assets including initially full ownership of the Mediterranean Blue cable and some ownership on Blue-Raman, Equiano, Seabras1, and Curie. However, voice comprises a significant portion of its revenue which most investors will penalize in their valuation estimates. In general, the financial markets view voice as less valuable than data traffic because it is considered a low growth, low margin business. Data is sexy. Voice is not. I have always viewed Sparkle as a stodgy company with a 20th century management style with too well dressed senior managers. Rigid old hierarchical corporate structur...
