FiberCop has appointed Marco Nespolo as chief executive, bringing the long serving head of the Italian paper and labels group Fedrigoni to run the company that owns Italy's fixed line access network.
The board resolved on the appointment in late September and it takes effect this month, according to the company's own announcement. Massimo Sarmi, chairman since the company was created and chief executive since the start of this year, remains as chairman, which FiberCop described as providing continuity of governance while the national fibre network is built out.
An industrialist rather than a telecoms executive
Nespolo is not from the telecommunications industry, and that is the most striking feature of the appointment. He was chief executive and chairman of Fedrigoni for close to eight years, stepping down from both roles this month to take the FiberCop job while keeping his equity stake and remaining on the Fedrigoni board. Rolf Stangl has become executive chairman there.
Before Fedrigoni he was chief executive of Cerved, the Italian credit information and business data group, and earlier worked at Citibank, at Bain and Company and at Bain Capital's private equity arm. He is a graduate of Bocconi.
Read together, that record describes a particular type of executive: someone who has run leveraged, private equity owned industrial businesses through buy and build programmes and operational restructuring. Fedrigoni under his leadership made a long series of acquisitions and expanded internationally while held by private capital. FiberCop is owned by private capital, carries significant debt and has to execute a multi year capital programme. The board has recruited for that experience rather than for network engineering, which the company already has in Sarmi.
Who owns FiberCop, and why it matters to Gulf readers
FiberCop is a single shareholder company belonging to the Optics Holdco group, and the ownership behind that holding is unusually international for a national network asset. KKR's infrastructure arm holds 37.8 per cent, CPP Investments 17.5 per cent, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority 17.5 per cent, Italy's Ministry of Economy and Finance 16 per cent and the Italian infrastructure fund F2i 11.2 per cent.
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority's stake makes this a Gulf sovereign position in a European strategic network asset, sitting alongside the Italian state itself. That pattern, Gulf sovereign capital taking large minority positions in regulated European infrastructure next to national governments, has become one of the defining features of the region's outbound investment, and this is one of its larger expressions.
FiberCop describes itself as the first case in the European Union of network ownership separated from the former incumbent, having been carved out of Telecom Italia. That separation is the source of both its commercial logic and its difficulty: as a wholesale only operator it sells access to the retail providers that were once its parent's colleagues, and its returns depend on regulated pricing and on how quickly Italian households move from copper to fibre. Italy's fibre take up has lagged its coverage for years, which is the gap the incoming chief executive has been hired to close.
About FiberCop
FiberCop is the Italian wholesale fixed network operator created from Telecom Italia's access network, owning and operating the copper and fibre infrastructure that retail providers use to serve Italian homes and businesses.
