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September 2nd, 2013 
Peter Nolan By Kate Holton
LONDON (Reuters) – Verizon Communications was poised on Monday to take full control of its U.S. wireless business with a $130 billion deal to buy out Vodafone and end a decade-long corporate stand-off.
The British firm said late on Sunday it was in advanced talks with Verizon to sell its 45 percent stake in the Verizon Wireless joint venture for cash and common shares in what would be the world’s third-largest deal of all time.
People familiar with the situation told Reuters they expected a full announcement after the London stock market closes on Monday, and after the board of Verizon meets to vote on the proposed transaction for the biggest mobile operator in the United States.
The Vodafone board has voted in principle to back the deal, one person familiar with the situation said.
The move to sell Verizon closes a heady expansionist chapter for Vodafone, one of Britain’s best-known companies, which grew rapidly over the last 20 years through a spate of aggressive deals, taking its brand into more than 30 countries across Europe, Africa and India.
The world’s largest deal, a $203 billion hostile takeover of Germany’s Mannesmann in 2000, made Vodafone the company it is today.
The new Vodafone will be smaller, less profitable and more reliant on its core, mature European assets but it is expected to use the windfall to rebuild via smaller acquisitions and higher network investments.
Speculation has already begun that the 31-year-old company could itself become a bid target, and news of the pending deal sent its shares up 4 percent to a more than 12-year high in London trade on Monday.
Under the terms of the proposed agreement, Vodafone would get $60 billion in cash, $60 billion in Verizon stock, and an additional $10 billion from smaller transactions that will take the total deal value to $130 billion, two of the people familiar with the matter have told Reuters.
To fund the cash portion of the deal, Verizon has lined up as much as $65 billion in financing from four banks: JPMorgan Chase & Co, Morgan Stanley, Barclays Plc and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, they said. The banks have committed to the financing, which is expected to be split evenly among the four, two people said.
INCREASING PRESSURE
The news that a final agreement is near follows years of speculation as to when and whether Vodafone, the world’s second largest mobile operator, would exit the highly successful business.
Vodafone entered the United States in 1999 through a series of deals that resulted in the formation of Verizon Wireless in 2000, with Verizon Communications holding 55 percent of the company and Vodafone the rest.
But the two sides clashed almost immediately and the partnership has over the years been fraught with difficulties, with both partners at times seeking to buy out the other.
Verizon at one point withheld dividends from Vodafone for six years in a bid to force the British group out. Those efforts were resisted by Arun Sarin, who led the company from 2003 to 2008, and then by current boss Vittorio Colao.
Their resistance, often in the face of investor demands for a sale, may prove to have been a masterstroke. Verizon Wireless became the largest operator in the United States, a growing market that boasts higher margins and prices than in Europe.
Since it resumed paying dividends, Vodafone has received 7.4 billion pounds ($11.5 billion) from the U.S. business, helping it to return 23 billion pounds in total to shareholders in the last three years and making it a must-have stock for funds and pension groups around the world.
The cash coming out of the U.S. business also helped the British group mask the pressures it was under in Europe, where its assets have been hit by recession and regulation. Full-year results to March 2013 showed that more than half of the group’s adjusted operating profit came from Verizon Wireless.
For Verizon, it is unfettered access to that cash that makes the deal worth $130 billion, and the improved relations between the two companies, led by Colao and Verizon’s Lowell McAdam, has helped pave the way, sources have said.
Even after the bump in price, the deal is expected to be accretive to Verizon’s earnings, one of the sources said.
But Colao’s decision to finally do a deal may also indicate that the intense competition that has convulsed European markets for years could be making its way to the U.S. market, where Japan’s SoftBank Corp has taken control of Sprint Nextel Corp, the No. 3 U.S. wireless provider.
Talks between the two sides picked up in earnest a few weeks ago, as Verizon grew concerned that its window of opportunity was closing, with interest rates due to rise and its own stock price declining.
That prompted Verizon to raise the offer price from the $100 billion it had initially floated to around $130 billion, sources have said.
($1 = 0.6465 British pounds)
(Editing by Will Waterman)
Source Article from http://news.yahoo.com/verizon-vodafone-announce-130-billion-u-deal-012417447–sector.html
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