• Swisscom has completed its acquisition of Vodafone Italy
• It has merged its existing Italian fixed line operation, Fastweb, with the mobile network operator
• It is Italy’s largest mobile operator, with more than 20 million customers

Swisscom has completed its €8bn cash acquisition of Vodafone Italy and has merged the mobile operator with its Italian fixed line operation, Fastweb, to create a new, major converged telco for the Italian market that sports a no-nonsense, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin name – Fastweb + Vodafone. 

“By combining Fastweb’s strengths in fixed connectivity with Vodafone Italia’s leading position in mobile services, the combined entity will offer innovative, competitively priced converged services to Italian consumers and businesses,” noted Swisscom in its announcement about the completion of the M&A deal, which was first revealed in late February last year. 

The newly formed telco has more than 20 million mobile customers (including 3.8 million from Fastweb), making it the largest mobile operator in Italy by the number of cellular connections: Wind Tre has about 19 million, Telecom Italia (TIM) has 16.1 million and Iliad has 11.45 million. 

It also has 5.6 million fixed line connections, second only to Telecom Italia’s 7.25 million. 

It will continue to use the existing brands Fastweb, Vodafone and ho. (which is Vodafone Italy’s low-cost, digital mobile service provider that was introduced to compete with Iliad Italy).  

Swisscom noted that because the acquisition was completed on 31 December 2024, it will record a €200m charge related to the deal in its 2024 accounts, a move that reduces its full year 2024 earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) guidance to between 4.3bn and 4.4bn Swiss francs. “These costs relate to the planned exit from existing MVNO [mobile virtual network operator] and mobile network-sharing agreements in connection with the migration of Fastweb mobile customers to the Vodafone Italia network and are part of the previously communicated integration costs,” noted Swisscom. Fastweb has had an MVNO and network sharing deal with Wind Tre since 2019. 

Walter Renna, CEO of Fastweb + Vodafone, stated: “The official closing completes the most important consolidation operation in recent years on the Italian telecommunications market. Starting in the next few days, we will work to start the integration process between the two companies, quickly unlock their potential and offer customers in all market segments even more innovative and high-performance services. Fastweb + Vodafone will be a company based on a culture of inclusion and transparency, with people, their experience and expertise at its core.” 

Swisscom expects to eventually reduce the operator’s annual operating costs by €600m as a result of “increased scale, a more efficient cost structure and significant annual run-rate synergies”, he added. 

The new operator also becomes a very significant part of the Swisscom empire, as one-third of the Swiss telco’s total 23,000 group employees are in Italy and almost half of its 15bn Swiss francs (€16bn) annual revenues are now generated by the Italian operations, according to Swisscom’s CEO, Christoph Aeschlimann.

The majority of the Fastweb + Vodafone executive team that will report to Renna has been named – you can see the full details here – with the exception of a permanent CTO and chief IT officer (CIO). In the interim, those posts will be filled respectively by Swisscom’s head of IT, network and infrastructure operations, Mark Duesener, and John de Keijzer , a “manager with long-standing IT experience within the Swisscom Group”, noted the telco. 

Vodafone Group will continue to “provide certain services to Vodafone Italy for a period of up to five years post deal completion,” the giant telco noted in this announcement. Those services are expected to cost Fastweb + Vodafone about €350m this year. 

For Vodafone Group, the deal marks the latest chapter in its ongoing reorganisation under CEO Margherita Della Valle: In addition to offloading the underperforming Italian operations, she also oversaw the sale of Vodafone Spain to Zegona Communications for €5bn in 2024 and helped to steer the proposed merger of Vodafone UK and Three through some choppy regulatory waters – that deal is expected to be completed during the first half of 2025. 

According to Vodafone, the UK merger will be the final step in the “reshaping” of its European operations and it will now focus “on growing markets in Europe, where it has a strong position and good local scale”.

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV