French telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel is to become the largest shareholder in Vodafone, the group behind the UK’s biggest mobile network, after agreeing a £4.4 billion deal to buy out Emirati giant e&’s entire stake.

Niel, the largest private investor in Europe’s telecoms sector, will acquire the 16.2 per cent shareholding, which carries 17.13 per cent of Vodafone’s voting rights, through Vega, a newly created acquisition vehicle. e&, formerly known as Etisalat, will receive £1.11 per share, with ownership expected to transfer by the end of the year.

For the millions of UK businesses that rely on Vodafone for mobile and broadband connectivity, the arrival of a new anchor investor is more than a City curiosity. Niel’s family group runs telecoms businesses across 26 countries in Europe and Latin America, with 139 million subscribers, 45,000 employees and €24 billion in annual revenues. Its assets include iliad, Salt, Monaco Telecom, Eir, Tele2 and Millicom.

He is also one of Europe’s most active technology backers, having ploughed approximately €4 billion into European AI projects since 2022, alongside a longer record of supporting education and entrepreneurship platforms including School 42, Station F, Hectar and Kima Ventures.

Vega has stressed the investment is intended as a long-term, strategic minority shareholding rather than a prelude to a takeover.

The deal lands at a pivotal moment for Vodafone’s UK operations. In May the group agreed a £4.3 billion deal to take full ownership of VodafoneThree, buying out the 49 per cent stake held by CK Hutchison, parent company of Three. The joint venture has already made an £11 billion pledge to bring standalone 5G to virtually every corner of the UK by 2034, a rollout with clear stakes for small firms in poorly connected areas.

Vodafone’s FY26 results showed revenue up 8 per cent to €40.5 billion, with profit before tax of almost £1.9 billion, a sharp turnaround from a £1.5 billion loss the previous year as the group simplifies its business. Investor sentiment was nonetheless dampened by a pause in share buybacks to fund the VodafoneThree buyout, disappointing results in Germany, its largest market, and a miss on its overall adjusted earnings forecast.

The deal also comes amid a wider push for scale in European telecoms. Vodafone chief executive Margherita Della Valle has warned that Europe’s 5G rollout lags behind the US and Asia, blaming fragmented markets and regulation that deters investment.

“Vodafone is a compelling investment opportunity, underpinned by quality assets, strong brands, leadership positions and a diversified geographic footprint,” said Niel. “As a simpler, more focused business, Vodafone is ready for a new phase of growth and is well-placed to unlock substantial untapped value across its European and African operations.

“We are confident Vodafone can deliver sustainable growth and strong cash flow generation over the long term and – as an anchor investor based in Europe – we are ready to contribute our deep sector expertise and operational know-how to its future success.

“As demonstrated by our past investments – including as minority investors in listed companies like Tele2 and Millicom – we have a proven track record of helping businesses to perform better and create substantial shareholder value.”

The change at the top of the shareholder register comes as Vodafone’s relationship with small business partners remains under scrutiny at home, where the company is defending an £85 million High Court claim brought by former franchisees.

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Mark Pownall is joined by Gary Adshead, Sam Jones and Claire Tyrrell to talk about the big events of the week in WA business and politics, including a cabinet reshuffle, Secret Harbour’s byelection, university mergers, Pilbara IR, Telstra‘s outage, cyber attacks, WA building stats, Cultural Centre blowout, Vic Park, Vasse and Yallingup. 

Employees at Wayve, the British autonomous driving firm, began selling $85 million of their shares today in the first employee share sale ever conducted on the London Stock Exchange’s Private Securities Market, a moment with real consequences for every UK founder who has ever promised staff their options would one day be worth something.

Crowdcube managed the sell-side of the transaction, which is not only a first for the PSM but also the largest deal completed under the FCA’s PISCES regulation, the Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange System, since the framework went live.

The PSM is designed to provide liquidity in some of the world’s leading later-stage private companies, while helping current employees with vested equity to unlock some of the value they have helped to create. In plain terms, staff at private firms can now sell a slice of their holdings through a regulated exchange without waiting for a float or a trade sale.

That matters well beyond Cambridge and the robotaxi race. Share options have long been the growing firm’s answer to corporate salaries it cannot match, but the promise has always carried an asterisk: the money is theoretical until an exit arrives, and exits have been thin on the ground. A functioning secondary market changes the conversation an SME founder can have with a prospective hire.

Dame Julia Hoggett, CEO of London Stock Exchange plc, said: “We are delighted to see the PISCES framework and our Private Securities Market being utilised by innovative companies, such as Wayve, seeking liquidity events for their stakeholders, including employees.”

Wayve is arguably the ideal poster child. The company closed a $1.5 billion funding round valuing it at $8.6 billion earlier this year, the highest valuation yet achieved by a UK AI start-up, and in May signed a formal partnership with the government to accelerate self-driving deployment on British roads. Its staff have built substantial paper wealth. Today, some of it becomes actual wealth, in London rather than New York.

Matt Cooper, Crowdcube co-CEO, said: “This is what we hope will be the first of many of these transactions with other partners for Crowdcube – using our leading infrastructure to manage a complex employee liquidity transaction on the London Stock Exchange’s Private Securities Market – as we’ve done for Wayve in this instance.

“As Europe’s leading private market liquidity platform, Crowdcube’s is seeing a massive increase in the number of companies looking to complete secondary share sales in the next 6-12 months.

“These are transactions for a wide variety of companies, providing liquidity for employees and early stage investors that Crowdcube can support, including through the Private Securities Market.”

That pipeline comment deserves attention. With UK start-ups enjoying a record fundraising first half but staying private for longer, pressure for liquidity from employees and early backers has been building for years. If Cooper is right, Wayve’s tender is the start of a queue, and businesses far smaller than an $8.6 billion AI champion will be watching how the mechanics perform.

The $85 million employee tender was supported by Registered Auction Agents Stifel, acting as sole and exclusive private placement agent, alongside advisors Latham & Watkins and Deloitte.

For UK capital markets, bruised by years of headlines about departing listings, this is a rarer story: new infrastructure, built in London, being used at scale on day one. For business owners, the lesson is simpler still. Equity you give your team may soon be worth something before you sell up, and that changes how you hire.

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Emerging markets bull Christopher Wood says the spectacular AI trade is showing clear signs of “fatigue”, and Jefferies is responding by tilting exposure toward cheaper, under‑owned markets such as India and China that stand to benefit from mean reversion away from crowded AI winners. He believes the “picks and shovels” of the AI capex boom will keep outperforming even as investors rotate out of hyperscalers and into value names across Asia.

In his newsletter ‘GREED & fear’, Wood writes that the new quarter has opened “with much talk of ‘AI fatigue’ as investors look out for a peaking out of momentum and rotation into cheaper ‘value’ names which have not been part of the AI trade,” citing Tencent as one Asian example. He argues that sharp pullbacks in Korea’s AI leaders are “both natural and healthy” after “hyperbolic moves,” with the Kospi now down 22% from its 19 June peak and single‑stock leveraged ETFs on SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics dropping around 30% from asset highs.

Wood highlights just how extreme the AI run‑up has been: since the start of 2023, a market‑cap‑weighted basket of Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics has surged about 760%, versus a 180% gain for a basket of Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. “Long‑term GREED & fear would still rather own the DRAM makers,” he says, adding that “the demand for compute can keep growing even as the cost of tokens collapse,” while he has “no idea which of the hyperscalers, if any, are going to be successfully monetising their AI capex.”

Also Read | Korea’s pain will be India’s gain? Why Nifty bears betting on Kospi crash may get disappointed

Trillion‑Dollar AI Capex, Thin Monetisation

Jefferies underscores the macro scale of the AI build‑out, estimating that the four major US hyperscalers will spend about US$700bn on capex this year and more than US$800bn next year, rising to over US$1tn in 2027 when Oracle, Anthropic, OpenAI and neo‑cloud players are included. This US$1tn figure equates to roughly 3% of US GDP, around 22% of US non‑residential fixed investment and an estimated 33% of total pre‑tax profits of all US non‑financial companies, underlining Wood’s description of AI as “the mother of all cycles.”
Yet, he warns that the financing and accounting of this capex arms race are increasingly stretched. The four hyperscalers have lifted projected capex to a massive 92% of projected operating cash flow, collectively issued US$169bn of bonds so far this year and accumulated US$662bn of future data‑centre lease commitments that remain off balance sheet, with total undiscounted lease obligations nearing US$969bn.
Why Jefferies Is Rotating Toward India

Against that backdrop, Jefferies is deliberately tilting its Asia Pacific ex‑Japan asset‑allocation toward markets less dominated by AI momentum. In its latest GREED & fear note, the firm assigns India a 12% recommended weight versus a 10.9% benchmark weight in the MSCI AC Asia Pacific ex‑Japan index, giving India a positive mismatch of 1.1 percentage points.

Despite a correction in memory stocks, GREED & fear remains Underweight Taiwan and only Neutral on Korea, having cut Korea’s neutral weighting from 24.6% to 20.8% since late June, while maintaining exposure to smaller ASEAN markets largely “just to maintain a presence there.” Wood’s message is that markets like India, which host “cheaper ‘value’ names which have not been part of the AI trade,” are well positioned to benefit from any sustained rotation out of momentum AI names.

China: Valuation Play in the Rotation

China is the other key leg of Jefferies’ rotation. Wood states that “it is too late to sell MSCI China or indeed Hong Kong,” arguing that this is “precisely the area that should benefit from any mean reversion out of momentum AI names,” a view he credits to Jefferies’ global head of quantitative strategy, Desh Peramunetilleke.

MSCI China has de‑rated sharply to just 10.6 times 12‑month forward earnings, down from 13.9 times in October 2025 and 18.5 times in early 2021, even as the CSI 300 is up 11.9% in the first half of 2026 while MSCI China is down 14.9% in US dollar terms. Wood concedes that falling household loans and rising retail non‑performing loans are “one area of concern,” but maintains a base case that consumption is stabilising at a lower share of GDP and that China will avoid a self‑feeding negative equity cycle in residential property, leaving consumer and domestic‑demand stocks already pricing in much of the macro strain.

Bigger Than Dot‑Com – And Now Rotating

To frame the AI cycle historically, Jefferies notes that US investment in information‑processing equipment and software has climbed to 4.88% of nominal GDP in 1Q26, surpassing the 4.46% peak reached at the height of the dot‑com boom in 4Q00. Wood stresses that the earnings from this capex boom are “front‑end loaded” in favour of picks‑and‑shovels suppliers, while hyperscalers spent US$130bn on capex in 1Q26 but booked only US$41. 6bn of depreciation and amortisation, making profits look technically overstated.

With the Hyperscalers‑4 index underperforming the S&P 500 by 11% since early May and AI leaders well off their highs, Wood argues that investors can no longer ignore the risks around monetisation, financing and political pushback to data‑centre projects. “So long as the AI capex arms race continues, the beneficiaries will remain the picks and shovels trade (i.e. the people being paid for the capex, not the companies spending the money),” he concludes, as Jefferies repositions toward India, China and other Asian markets poised to gain from a long‑overdue rotation out of AI momentum.

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)

Meta must change Facebook’s and Instagram’s “addictive” design or face a heavy fine, the EU has warned.

In its preliminary findings, the European Commission said features such as infinite scroll, autoplaying videos and personalised recommendations could encourage “compulsive use”, particularly among children and teens.

If Meta does not make suitable changes, it could be fined up to 6% of its total global annual turnover.

A spokesperson for the tech giant told the BBC it disagreed with the findings “which don’t accurately take into account the significant steps we’ve taken to protect teens”.

In the preliminary findings, the Commission said the endless stream of content “shift the brain into autopilot mode, contributing to unhealthy habits”.

In particular, it is particularly concerned about the impact social media platforms may have on younger users.

“Protecting the physical and mental health of Europeans must be a priority for social media platforms,” EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen said in a statement.

The Commission said Meta failed to adequately assess the risks posed by how Facebook and Instagram were designed, as well as how long children spend on the platforms, particularly at night.

It raised concerns about features such as Reels and Stories, arguing they could contribute to excessive use, and claimed Meta’s safeguards do not go far enough.

The Commission said time-management tools on Facebook and Instagram, including those enabled by default for teenagers, can be dismissed and do not meaningfully reduce usage.

And it also criticised Meta’s parental controls, arguing they are only effective if parents have the time and technical expertise to understand and use them properly.

But Meta said it had rolled out Teen Accounts that “automatically protect teens and put parents in control – allowing them to block access to Instagram at night and cap daily screen time at just 15 minutes”.