European investment firm Asterion Industrial Partners has acquired a majority stake in digital infrastructure operator Irideos and plans to merge it with another Italian fiber company.
Asterion this week announced it had acquired a 78.4 percent stake in Irideos S.p.A. from Fondi Italiani per le Infrastrutture Sgr. (F2i). Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but reports suggest the figure was around the $400 million mark. The deal is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2022.
Formed from the merger of Infracom, KPNQwest Italia, MC-link, BiG TLC, and Enter, Irideos offers connectivity, data center, and cloud solutions through a network of 27,000 km fibre optic routes and 15 data centers across Milan, Trento, Verona, and Rome. The company’s main data center is located at its Avalon Campus near Milan; it broke ground on a third Avalon facility in the city last year.
Asterion aims to merge Irideos with Retelit, another Italian communications company, which the investment firm said would create the “largest alternative wholesale access and B2B connectivity provider in Italy.”
Founded in 1999, Retelit’s optical fiber infrastructure includes a network of 15,000 km of fiber and a presence in 19 data centers (18 across Italy and 1 in Innsbruck, Austria). It offers wholesale access, B2B connectivity, ICT, and colocation solutions and services. Asterion acquired the entirety of the company in December 2021 after previously acquiring a 24 percent stake in October 2020.
Jesús Olmos, Founding Partner and CEO at Asterion Industrial Partners, said: “The add-on acquisition of a majority stake in Irideos paves the way for the next growth phase of our Italian platform of fibre and data center assets. We are particularly excited about the opportunity to combine Retelit and Irideos, creating a leading independent platform of significant scale.”
Renato Ravanelli, CEO at F2i, Fondi Italiani per le Infrastrutture, added: “F2i has built over the years Irideos as main independent corporate telecom provider in Italy through a process of aggregation and bailout of smaller Italian operators, whose value and expertise would have been otherwise lost. Today we proudly deliver Irideos, its important activities and its 650 employees to a new phase of growth, thanks to the strengthening of its position that will result from entering a larger project. We are confident that Irideos, with Asterion’s support, will consolidate its leadership and proceed to the next level of its development.”
Asterion also owns Nabiax, a Latin American and Spanish-focused data center firm. Nabiax’s portfolio of facilities is based on a portfolio of data centers acquired from Telefónica.
