We have to go back in time to find a Telecom Italia shareholders' meeting as electric as the one that promises to take place tomorrow. The spotlights will turn on the difficult navigation of the largest Italian telecommunications group between the rocks of the recession, the often unfair competition of the Over the Top and the legacy of the past. But it is quite clear that the minds and hearts of the shareholders will be warmed above all by the Chinese and Hutchison Whampoa's plan to become Telecom's reference shareholder without a takeover bid but through the integration of 3HG and consequent exchange and adjustment. Large and small partners are already doing their accounts and evaluating the benefits of a deal that presents different faces in their eyes. The Spaniards of Telefonica, the only true industrial partner at least on paper, are the most wary and would not want to leave the field to Chinese competitors. The large financial shareholders (from Intesa Sanpaolo, which is the most optimistic, to Mediobanca and Generali) can't wait to get out of an investment that has given them more sorrows than joys only if the exchange rate is plausible. Lastly, the small shareholders: they are afraid of running out of steam due to the initial exclusion of the takeover bid.
But a shareholders' meeting like that of Telecom and above all a takeover project from abroad like that of the group led by the Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-Shing – who has known the executive chairman of Telecom, Franco Bernabè, for more than fifteen years – is not deal that concerns only the shareholders. Not only because, however bruised, Telecom Italia remains one of the few large groups of an Italian capitalism that has always been afflicted by entrepreneurial dwarfism. But because Telecom owns and manages an infrastructure – such as the fixed telephony network – which has always been considered strategic and as such even protected by the golden share. Precisely on this point and especially in view of the formation of a new government, however, it will be good not to go off topic and gear up to intelligently defend true national interests, knowing that not all of them are strategic.
Basically: is Telecom Italia still strategic today or not? Does it deserve an outcry from economic patriotism or not? We have to distinguish. Of national interest are those assets which, under the given conditions, have two unmistakable characteristics: they contribute significantly to economic development and the formation of the GDP and are not replicable. From this point of view, the Telecom fixed network is and remains, in the current technological and market conditions, certainly strategic and deserves to be protected and to remain firmly in Italian hands in compliance with European rules.
But the discussion on the services that transit on the network and that Telecom offers in competition with other operators is completely different: these are certainly important but, in a now liberalized market, not only are they widely replicable but they can no longer be considered strategic. Nothing wrong, therefore, if the part of Telecom that manages or sells telecommunications services ended up in the hands of foreign groups: today we are talking about the Chinese, but it is by no means certain that the Egyptian Sawiris (formerly Wind) will not return to office or let Mexican Slim show up again.
The discourse of the network is different which, not being replicable and investing sensitive national interests, will no longer end up under other skies and must remain an Italian garrison. As? The spin-off of the network from Telecom and the entry into the field of an institutional subject such as Cassa depositi e prestiti, strengthened by a competent top management such as the one that will be renewed precisely tomorrow in the persons of the president Franco Bassanini and the CEO Gorno Tempini, is the right and it is here that the new government will have to play its part.
The renewed interest of foreign investors, the market and institutions in Telecom Italia is therefore welcome, but be careful not to make short-sighted provincial barricades and useless rearguard battles like some trade union voices but also politicians who never fail to threaten.
