Two of central Europe’s largest telecoms companies are planning property disposals involving several hundred million euro of prime Polish and Czech Republic assets.
Cesky Telecom, the Czech Republic’s main fixed-line operator, is to sell the non-core holdings within its portfolio, which have a nominal book value of around €340m. But according to local agents, any large-scale property disposal may have to wait until after the government has sold its stake in the company, which is not expected to happen until 2005.
Poland’s largest telecoms firm, TPSA, is also conducting an inventory of around 2,500 property holdings throughout the country, which include offices, retail and customer service centres, in addition to its unfinished Warsaw headquarters.
Joe Borowski, vice-president of Knight Frank Warsaw, said that a sale-and-leaseback deal could make sense for the company. “Companies are certainly in cost-cutting mode at the moment and TPSA has a large amount of property on its balance sheet,” he said.
