BT sells Irish B2B units as international retreat continuesBT sells Irish B2B units as international retreat continues

Under the agreement, BT Communications Ireland Ltd (BTCIL) – which provides wholesale and enterprise services – will sell its 3,400 kilometre fibre network, more than 400 customers, and related support teams to Ireland's Speed Fibre Group. It's a holding company that owns wholesaler Enet and retail provider Magnet+, and is itself owned by UK-listed infrastructure investor Cordiant Digital Infrastructure.

The agreement does not cover BTCIL's customer base of multinationals, large Irish organisations, or its emergency call handling service and all the teams associated with those. Neither does it include its data centres, because BT has already agreed to sell them to Equinix.

BT and Speed Fibre have also established a long-term agreement to source connectivity for their respective customers from one another.

All in, the enterprise value of the transaction comes to €22 million. Not a bad bit of business, but not exactly an eye-watering sum of money either.

Last week, BT announced that Jon James, chief executive of Danish telco Nuuday, will become CEO of BT Business in March, leaving Burger with even more time to devote to selling off various international assets as part of group CEO Allison Kirkby's strategy of focusing primarily on the UK.

"Today's announcement is another key milestone in focusing our international business on what it does best: providing secure multi-cloud connectivity to large organisations globally and in Ireland," said Burger. "Our Irish wholesale and enterprise business unit, which has been a leading alternative provider for more than 30 years, will enter a new era with Speed Fibre Group. We are confident that Speed Fibre Group will continue to deliver exceptional service to customers, and we look forward to working together with them as our future partner in Ireland."

Peter McCarthy, CEO of Speed Fibre Group, said: "We are thrilled to announce that BT Communications Ireland, which includes wholesale and enterprise connectivity customers, will become part of Speed Fibre Group, marking an exciting milestone in our shared journey. This acquisition enables us to deliver even greater value to our customers by expanding our range of connectivity solutions. It's a positive development for the Irish market, providing us with the scale and capabilities to better serve our growing customer base."

BT has been steadily chipping away at is international operations for years now, so much so that it's hard to keep up.

It bid 'vaarwel' to its Dutch infrastructure assets nearly six year ago, and followed that up pretty rapidly with the sale of its Spanish ICT business. March 2020 saw BT do a deal to sell its French domestic unit to UK-based enterprise services provider Computacenter. Later that same year, Italian incumbent TIM acquired some of BT Italy's B2B assets.

All these deals pre-date the Kirkby era. A year into her tenure, and with Burger's remit reduced to focusing on portfolio optimisation, further sales are undoubtedly in the pipeline.