M&A Monthly: September/October 2026

Welcome back to another edition of M&A Monthly, where TeleGeography's GlobalComms team tracks the deals that keep the world connected. Here's your essential round-up of September’s top telecoms takeovers and big-money buyouts.

(Read last month's M&A Monthly here.)

Europe

Beginning in Europe, Poste Italiane now controls 85.82% of the shares of Telecom Italia (TIM) following the closing of the second phase of its buyout offer. This meant that the state-backed postal services operator fell short of the 90% ownership threshold which would have triggered a squeeze-out of remaining shareholders and allowed Poste to delist TIM’s shares. Poste launched its €13 billion ($14.8 billion) bid for TIM back in March this year and by the end of the first phase of its share offer had garnered a 66.6% stake in the fixed and mobile operator, with acceptance from shareholders equating to 46.52% of TIM’s shares and adding to the 20.10% stake Poste already owned. The national postal operator will now have to find a new way to take TIM private.

In the Netherlands, private equity firm Apax Partners is closing in on a deal to buy Warburg Pincus out of their joint investment in Dutch telecoms player Odido, in a deal which could value Odido at around €6.5 billion. Since pausing plans for an IPO of Odido, the asset is said to have piqued the interest of state-backed telecoms group Saudi Telecom Company (stc).

British fixed broadband provider TalkTalk is no longer in exclusive talks with Octopus Investments regarding the potential sale of the former’s wholesale unit, PlatformX Communications (PXC). A prospective deal for TalkTalk’s consumer arm also floundered, with an exclusivity period granted to Opus Broadband expiring a matter of days earlier. Opus, however, returned to the negotiating table later in the month with a new, lower-priced bid for the embattled ISP’s B2C arm. The offer of £100 million ($132 million) was just half the original price the business had been expected to fetch and is expected to be rejected.

Meanwhile, Maltese fixed and mobile operator Melita is set to acquire 100% of the shares of rival operator Epic Communications in a deal which, if approved, would reduce the number of players in the country’s mobile market from three down to two. Epic is currently owned by Monaco Telecom, while Melita is controlled by Goldman Sachs Alternatives.

Latin America

Over in Latin America, Digicel Group has entered into a definitive agreement to sell its El Salvador operations to General International Telecom El Salvador (GITES), as part of a strategy to focus on its core Caribbean markets and strengthen its financial position. No purchase price or financial details were disclosed for the transaction, which is expected to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. GITES, a subsidiary of UK-based General International Telecom Limited, entered the Salvadoran market in October 2021 through the $144 million purchase of Telefonica’s local business Movistar, backed by affiliates of Atlantida Group.

Buenos Aires-based B2B operator Metrotel is expected to use the Tuenti brand name for the mobile and fiber assets that it’s planning to acquire from Telecom Argentina (Personal). Personal is obliged to divest six million mobile subscriptions, more than 200,000 fixed broadband customers and a quantity of excess spectrum to finalize its controversial 2025 takeover of Telefonica Argentina (Movistar). The proposed transaction was approved by the National Competition Agency (Agencia Nacional de Competencia, ANC) earlier in September.

Sticking with South America, Telefonica is considering a sale of its Movistar Venezuela unit, with a view to exiting the country within the next year. The Madrid-based group has already received an unsolicited approach for the business, after preliminary discussions were initiated by Latin America Real Assets Opportunities (LARA), a Miami-based private equity firm co-founded by Mauricio Claver-Carone, who previously worked as a special envoy to Latin America for the Trump administration. Trump, if you recall, ordered the Special Forces-led extraction of President Nicolas Maduro from Caracas in January this year.

Asia

Finally, turning our attentions to Asia, a possible deal for Singaporean telco M1 is being discussed by the operator’s majority owner Keppel Group and rival StarHub. Both sides were forced to confirm the talks via separate stock exchange statements, after press speculation. Back in May 2026 Australia’s Tuas announced that a S$1.43 billion ($1.1 billion) deal to acquire M1 and merge it with its SIMBA Telecom unit—struck back in August 2025—had officially been terminated.

 That wraps up this month’s M&A round-up. More next time.

Can AI help me stay up-to-date with M&A activity?

We're glad you asked. If you’re looking for a quick overview and background information on a market, AI is a useful way to get an idea of what’s going on there. But it’s a good idea to double check those findings, as AI often cites sources that are not authoritative and are out-of-date, incomplete, or just plain wrong.

AI tools are great at skimming the internet and sourcing data at lightning speed, but when it comes to telecom data, we often find that the articles cited by AI and fed into its answers are several years out of date—which means the facts, figures, and context to that information is also outdated.

And as people who’ve dedicated our careers to sourcing, collating, and analyzing telecom data, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention AI’s tendency to hallucinate and make up wrong answers (and then backtrack when you call it out).

Take a look at how this plays out in market research.

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