Verizon pays BT $625M in telecom shakeup

BT Group spent more than 18 months looking for a buyer for its international business. Nobody bit.

So BT did something different: It gave half of its international business to Verizon and kept the other half.

BT and Verizon announced on June 29 that they signed an agreement to combine their respective international enterprise operations into a new, jointly owned company. The deal comes with a price tag attached.

The terms of the Verizon and BT joint venture

The new venture is split 50:50 between BT and Verizon, with both companies holding equal voting rights.

Verizon is paying BT a $625 million equalization payment to balance the relative value of what each company is contributing, according to Verizon’s official announcement.

The combined entity brings together BT International with Verizon’s international enterprise wireline business.

Together, the two units are expected to serve more than 3,000 customers across over 180 countries, generating approximately $4 billion in combined annual revenue, Seeking Alpha reported. The new company will be incorporated in Jersey but headquartered and tax resident in the UK.

The transaction is expected to close in 2027, pending regulatory clearance and consultation with employee representatives in countries where that is required. Until then, BT International and Verizon’s international operations keep running independently.

Why BT chose a joint venture over a sale

BT spent more than a year shopping its international unit and could not find a buyer at the price it wanted. A joint venture solves that problem. BT keeps half the business and half the upside, rather than selling at a discount or holding onto a unit that no longer fits its strategy.

BT CEO Allison Kirkby has spent her tenure narrowing the company’s focus back toward the UK market, where BT generates most of its profit. She is running a cost-cutting program targeting £3.7 billion in savings by 2030, and BT’s total headcount is expected to fall to between 75,000 and 80,000 employees by the end of the decade.

“Today’s announcement marks a major milestone for BT International, and an important step forward for BT as a whole, as we deliver on our UK-focused strategy,” Kirkby said.

The joint venture lets BT redirect capital toward its UK fiber and 5G buildout while still owning half of a business serving thousands of multinational clients.

The combined entity brings together BT International with Verizon’s international enterprise wireline business.

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What Verizon and BT Customers should expect

Multinational companies want one telecom partner that can manage connectivity across borders and cloud environments. Right now, many of them juggle multiple providers in different regions just to keep their networks running.

That is the gap this deal is meant to close.

Verizon CEO Dan Schulman explained the thinking in the companies’ joint statement.

“Our international customers require secure, flexible connectivity that works seamlessly across borders and cloud environments. When we thought about how to best support them, this joint venture was the clear answer: a cutting-edge, AI-ready and secure platform run by a single global organization dedicated to their needs,” Schulman said.

More Verizon:

Schulman also said Verizon’s relationship with its U.S. customers stays the same. Verizon will keep providing domestic connectivity directly. The joint venture only covers the international side of the business.

Martijn Blanken has been named CEO-designate of the new company, pending the deal’s completion. Blanken brings nearly three decades of leadership experience across telecommunications and digital infrastructure, including roles at Telstra, EXA Infrastructure, and KPN.

He joins BT on September 1, 2026, to help prepare the venture for launch. Clive Selley, who currently runs BT International, stays in that role until the transaction closes.

How the market reacted to the Verizon-BT deal

BT shares rose nearly 1% in London trading on the news. Verizon shares slipped slightly in U.S. premarket trading.

Those are small moves, the kind that can reflect plenty of factors beyond a single announcement, but they line up with how differently this deal sits inside each company’s overall business.

The math backs that up. The new venture’s $4 billion in combined revenue is a much bigger slice of BT’s total business than it is of Verizon’s, which pulls in well over $130 billion a year from its core U.S. wireless and broadband operations.

For Verizon, this deal will not move quarterly earnings in any noticeable way. What it does is give Verizon a sharper enterprise story to tell investors, at a time when the company is trying to prove it can grow beyond consumer wireless.

A dedicated venture with its own leadership and its own capital structure lets Verizon compete for global business clients without pulling resources away from its core U.S. operations.

None of it happens until regulators in multiple countries sign off. Customers will not see any changes until the joint venture actually launches, and that is not expected before 2027.