Apax Partners will buy out Warburg Pincus’s stake in Odido, the Dutch mobile network operator, PE Hub reported, in a sponsor to sponsor transfer that leaves Apax as the controlling private equity owner of the business it and Warburg acquired from Deutsche Telekom and renamed in 2023.
Odido is the Dutch market’s challenger at scale: a full mobile network, a fixed line business and a value brand portfolio competing against KPN and VodafoneZiggo. Telecom assets of this kind generate the steady, regulated cash flows infrastructure style investors prize, and the transfer prices that duration rather than any operational change.
The deal is a specimen of the market’s current mechanics. With strategic buyers constrained by competition authorities from consolidating European mobile further, and IPO appetite for telecom thin, sponsors sell to each other and to continuation vehicles, extending holding periods that the original funds cannot. Warburg exits a 2021 vintage investment; Apax’s newer fund buys the same cash flows at today’s price.