MILAN (Reuters) – Asterion Industrial Partners said on Monday it had bought Italian digital infrastructure firm Irideos and would combine it with fibre services company Retelit to create Italy’s largest alternative wholesale access and business-to-business connectivity provider.
Spanish investment firm Asterion, which specialises in mid-market European infrastructure, had acquired Retelit and delisted it from the Milan stock exchange in November 2021.
It has now also acquired 78.4% of Irideos from Italian infrastructure fund F2i, it said in a statement.
“Asterion aims to consolidate Retelit’s and Irideos’s position in the Italian telecom sector by merging the two highly complementary businesses,” it said in a statement.
Irideos operates a network of 27,000 km fibre optic routes along motorways, the Adriatic coast and in metropolitan areas, as well as through 15 data centres.
Retelit runs around 15,000 km of fibre, including in Italy’s 14 largest cities, as well as 19 data centres, serving customers that range from large telecommunications companies to small & mid-sized businesses.
“Through this transaction, Asterion strengthens … its European digital infrastructure portfolio, which currently includes 1.4 million premises passed with Fibre-ToThe-Home, 49,000 km of long-distance fibre networks, 8,000 rural backhaul radiolinks and 42,000 square meters of data centre space in Spain, Italy, the UK, and Ireland,” it said.
JPMorgan advised Asterion on the transaction.
(Reporting by Valentina Za; Editing by Bernadette Baum)
