The telecommunications group Sunrise is returning to the Swiss stock exchange after a four-year absence. In doing so, she also wants to challenge the competition in Switzerland. SRF business editor Matthias Heim provides the most important questions and answers about the IPO.
Matthias Heim
Business editor
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Matthias Heim studied economic history. He has been working for Radio SRF since 2007 and has been a business editor since 2016. His areas of expertise are aviation, tourism, transport, retail and energy.
Why is Sunrise returning to the stock market?
Liberty Global, the previous owner of Sunrise, wants to make money from the IPO. Liberty Global is a British-Dutch-American telecommunications company and bought Sunrise at the end of 2020 for 6.8 billion francs. The company then took Sunrise off the stock exchange and restructured it. Now Liberty Global is hoping for additional income with the IPO of the “refreshed” Sunrise.
Are there new and cheaper offers for customers thanks to the IPO?
The IPO will not directly change Sunrise’s existing offering. However, Sunrise always emphasizes that, as number two in Switzerland, they want to challenge Swisscom as the market leader. Thanks to its three pillars – mobile communications, internet and TV – Sunrise can now offer a service comparable to that of Swisscom. However, customers in Switzerland are relatively loyal and rarely change providers. As a result, it will be challenging for Sunrise to lure away a lot of customers from the competition.
After four years of being fully owned by Liberty Global, Sunrise is now returning to the Swiss stock exchange.
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Who are currently the largest telecommunications companies in Switzerland?
Swisscom is still and undisputedly number one. This can be seen, for example, in the company’s financial figures: Swisscom, which is majority owned by the federal government, achieved sales of 5.5 billion francs in the first half of this year. The financial figures generally also reflect the proportions in terms of the number of customers at the company. At Sunrise, sales in the same period were 1.5 billion francs. Sunrise can hardly make up for this deficit, as Swisscom is currently expanding into Italy and is thereby substantially expanding its business activities.
Salt in third place
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Salt, number three in Switzerland, follows well behind Sunrise. Salt is owned by French entrepreneur Xavier Niel and generated sales of 550 million francs in the first six months of this year.
What is the relationship between Liberty Global and Sunrise?
The relationship between the two companies goes back several years. Liberty Global was the owner of the former cable network operator UPC, which was bought by Sunrise in 2019. Liberty Global then took over Sunrise and over the past four years has transformed both companies into a telecommunications provider with a comprehensive offering.
2019: Sunrise takes over UPC
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For a long time, Sunrise has been primarily a telephone company with mobile and landline telephony. In 2019, Sunrise took over the cable network operator UPC and thereby suddenly expanded its broadband internet and television offerings. Thanks to UPC, Sunrise was able to increase the number of customer relationships from 460,000 to 1.2 million in 2019, and its TV offering from 270,000 to 1.4 million.
How independent will Sunrise become with the IPO?
With the IPO, Sunrise will essentially have more operational leeway. However, Liberty Global will continue to have significant influence over the Company’s operations. The two executives of Liberty Global, John Malone and Mike Fries, are now major shareholders in Sunrise and will therefore have an important say on the board of directors. There are also ongoing service contracts between Sunrise and Liberty Global. In theory, Liberty Global could have kept Sunrise or sold it to another company. Apparently, the leadership of the multinational corporation has come to the conclusion that an IPO brings in the most money.
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