Jan 30, 2022
Activist Cevian pushes for sweeping overhaul at Vodafone
Europe's largest activist fund Cevian Capital is pushing UK mobile group Vodafone to restructure its portfolio, enhance its strategy in key markets and refresh its board to draw a line under years of poor share price performance. The campaign means that Vodafone joins healthcare group GlaxoSmithKline, energy company SSE and consumer goods giant Unilever as the latest large UK corporation with a high-profile activist publicly on its investor register. For Cevian, which manages around $15bn, the Vodafone bet fits in with an investment strategy that often calls for simplification at complex conglomerates which the activist believes are run inefficiently, suffocate the best units and generate poor investor returns. Cevian is pursuing this approach in other active campaigns at education group Pearson and insurer Aviva in the UK as well as Swedish telecoms equipment group Ericsson and Swiss industrial group ABB. Shares in Vodafone have sharply underperformed over the past five years. Bloomberg first revealed that Cevian had built a stake in Vodafone.
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