BT Group and Verizon form global enterprise joint venture

BT Group and Verizon Communications have agreed to fold their international enterprise operations into a 50:50 joint venture built for multinational customers that want one provider across borders. Verizon will pay BT a $625 million equalisation payment, both companies will hold equal voting rights, and the new business is expected to serve more than 3,000 customers in more than 180 countries with about $4 billion in combined annual revenue.

The structure points to a transaction that is as much about defence as expansion. BT will keep exposure to future upside while pulling cash out of a business line that has been hard to scale on its own, and Verizon gets a broader international footprint without having to recreate a global network from scratch. BT chief executive Allison Kirkby called the market “very fragmented” and said the deal could be “the start of further consolidation.” Verizon chief executive Dan Schulman said the venture was “the clear answer” for international customers who need secure, flexible connectivity that works across borders and cloud environments.

BT said the new platform will bring together BT International, which serves multinational customers with secure and resilient communication and network services, and Verizon’s international enterprise wireline arm. The companies said the venture is designed for a cloud-first world in the age of AI, a signal that the fight for enterprise telecom revenue now runs well beyond basic transport and into managed connectivity, cybersecurity and cloud-linked services. The transaction is expected to complete in 2027, subject to regulatory clearances and customary closing conditions.

The venture will be headquartered and tax resident in the UK and incorporated in Jersey. BT named Martijn Blanken as chief executive officer-designate, conditional on completion. BT said the broader scale should unlock efficiencies across global network and service operations, while the $625 million payment from Verizon will help fund the venture and any remainder may be used to pay down BT debt.

The deal also underlines how legacy carriers are reorganizing around customers rather than infrastructure alone. Coverage of the transaction described it as a service-layer consolidation, not a merger of physical subsea or national assets, which means the combined company will depend on network capacity owned or controlled by the parents or third-party carriers. That makes the joint venture less a bet on fiber and cables than on whether one coordinated sales and service platform can hold its ground against cloud providers and smaller rivals that have chipped away at the old global telecom model.