Investors waited to see if Vodafone’s freshly-appointed CEO Margherita Della Valle happened to be the appropriate choice to shake the company out of its protracted slump when she was chosen to the position last month.
Within a few weeks, Della Valle provided them with a sobering analysis of the issues Vodafone is facing. The company’s shares have fallen to 20-year lows as a result of the harsh response.
Italian-born Della Valle, who entered Vodafone in 1994 and has served as its CFO since 2018, promised on Tuesday to eliminate 11,000 of the company’s 90,000 jobs and hasten the delivery of new products by granting local country managers more autonomy.
Her assessment of the predicament Vodafone is currently in has heightened calls for agreements to restructure important areas and for modifications in the way it works.
An investor base with contradictory demands, worries about Vodafone’s dividend future, and a workforce hurting from significant job layoffs all complicate the situation.
AJ Bell’s financial director Russ Mould, the company is engaged in too many wars on too many fronts, and the balance sheet still shows too much debt. He also noted that the share rate is reflecting investor apprehension regarding the dividend.
With operations in Africa and Europe, the British business is still among the largest telecoms firms in the world, but after several years of poor results when compared to its competitors, several investors and experts have called for the appointment of a CEO from outside the company.
Della Valle gained over the board, contrary to what many analysts both inside and outside of the corporation had anticipated.
This week, she committed to focus more on Vodafone’s enterprise segment, which has always been a strength and where she thinks the company can gain market share as customers continue to seek out ever-cheaper deals.
Due in major part to a reduction in free cash flow expectations, Vodafone’s shares are currently trading at troughs last seen in 2002.
Enders Analysis informed investors that Vodafone is labelled a dividend company that incorporates the anticipation of a dividend decrease because the shares are currently yielding north of 9%.
Della Valle disregarded worries over Vodafone’s net debt, which the company reduced to 33.4 billion euros (about $37 billion), providing it a pro-forma-level net debt to fundamental earnings ratio of 2.5.
This effectively puts any worries about our debt quantities to rest, she said.
In the past, Vodafone had operations in the United States, Europe, Australia, Africa, and India. The company gained notoriety for making risky deals.
It has since made cuts, but is now compelled to go further and either leave the market or look for mergers in other European sectors, like Spain, where it has started a strategic assessment and is open to changes in structure like the sale or a network split.
In Spain, for example, it has undertaken a strategic study.
The framework of Vodafone, that includes three significant shareholders who might profit from a break-up, was defended by Della Valle, who stated that agreements were a priority but would not provide a timing estimate.
Dealmaking is proving to be challenging.
It announced in October that talks about combining its British operations with Hutchison’s UK division were still ongoing.
The organisational framework of Vodafone, its debt, and its modest share price all create complication. Nick Read, who is Della Valle’s predecessor, resigned in December as a result of investor annoyance with the rate of change.
Vodafone had respectable assets, according to a sizable, long-time institution investor, but required to provide more value.
When it was still unclear how competition authorities would react, an investment banker who had formerly worked with Vodafone claimed the new CEO had done a decent job of agreeing to making improvements without tying oneself to a deadline.
Now that business clients desire integrated services in fields like the Web and the Internet of Things, the justification for owning assets globally really makes more sense, the banker continued.
