Milan, Mar. 24 (LaPresse) – With the public tender offer and exchange launched by Poste on Tim, "we went back to the past and it was the future." This is what Vito Gamberale, former CEO of Sip and later Tim, told LaPresse. He led an important international development path in the 1990s. Engineer Gamberale, who was also CEO of Autostrade and chairman of Iterchimica and in 2020 founded Iter Capital Partners, an advisory firm, "positively" welcomes Poste Italiane’s Opas on the former telecom monopoly, from which he expects "an operation of greater concentration because," he explains, "in Italy there is a plurality of operators that cannot satisfy the income statement and the need for a certain critical mass of investments by operators" in the sector. He adds, "The consolidation of the shareholding seems to me an important step."
The Poste offer on Tim has been seen by some observers as a return of the state as shareholder (or an indirect nationalization, depending on perspective) through the integration between a publicly controlled company (Poste) and an operator (Tim) that in recent years has reorganized, no longer managing the infrastructure network but focusing on services for businesses and consumers and new technological frontiers, while also reducing debt. In short, a return of the state as shareholder in post-privatization Italy.
Privatizations, which Gamberale, born in 1944, recalls from direct experience and with distinctions. Gamberale, who played a leading role during the golden era of state-owned companies like Eni, Iri, Italstat, up to leading Telecom, defines the privatization of Telecom that took place 30 years ago as "poorly executed," while — he notes — other privatizations in Italy were done well. Examples include Eni, Enel, Leonardo, which were "glorious privatizations" because they followed the system that managers believed should have been applied to Telecom: increase the free float on the stock market while keeping the state as a minority shareholder, but with an authoritative and responsible role.
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