Investors have been getting increasingly frustrated at the poor returns from Vodafone (VOD), whose share price hit 25-year lows of 83.8p in the days before Christmas. That’s from 130p levels as recently as July 2022. Little wonder that calls from activists for change and improvement have been getting louder.

For context, Vodafone shares have delivered shareholders an average 2.64% a year return, including dividends, over the past decade. Returns from a FTSE 100 tracker would have produced a 6.33% annualised total return, according to Morningstar data.

Former CEO Nick Read stepped down at the end of 2022 after more than four years in the top job following intense pressure from critics. His tenure saw the share price lose roughly two-thirds of its value as the business struggles to compete in key markets like Germany and the UK under the strain of enormous debts. At the end of September 2022, Vodafone had more than €67.5 billion of long-term debt putting the company’s debt-to-equity ratio at about 116%.

Against such a difficult backdrop, investors will be hoping that further non-core assets can be sold, mirroring the recent sale of its Hungarian unit for €1.7 billion.

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