*

Bid excludes stakes in Intelcia, UltraEdge, XP Fibre,

Altice

Technical Services

*

SFR's B2B to Bouygues, Free; B2C to all three suitors

*

Orange confident it has capital for both Altice, MasOranfe

offers, source says

By Gianluca Lo Nostro and Dominique Patton

PARIS, Oct 14 (Reuters) - Bouygues Telecom,

Free-iliad Group and Orange said on Tuesday they had

submitted a nonbinding offer to acquire a large part of Altice's

activities in France for a total enterprise value of 17 billion

euros ($19.72 billion).

Europe's highly fragmented telecoms sector has been

consolidating. The nonbinding bid by Bouygues, Iliad and Orange

would be the region's second-biggest deal this year after Keurig

Dr Pepper's takeover of JDE Peet's.

The bid covers most of Altice-owned operator SFR's assets,

but excludes stakes in Intelcia, UltraEdge, XP Fibre and Altice

Technical Services, as well as the Altice group's activities in

French overseas departments and regions, the companies said in a

statement.

The split of price and value is expected to be around 43%

for Bouygues Telecom, 30% for Free-iliad Group and 27% for

Orange, the companies said. Under the proposal, SFR's business

to business (B2B) would be shared between Bouygues and Free,

while the business to consumer (B2C) as well as infrastructure

assets would be taken over by all three suitors.

SFR is France's second-biggest telecoms provider with more

than 19 million mobile subscribers and 6.1 million fibre

customers as of June.

France has had four mobile network operators since 2012:

Orange, Bouygues, Iliad's Free, and SFR.

A potential sale of SFR could reduce this number to three if

its assets are divided among competitors.

"We think the transaction can go through because otherwise,

we wouldn't have done it," Bouygues' group CEO Olivier Roussat

told reporters on a conference call.

Asked how soon a binding offer could be made, Roussat said,

"perhaps at the end of the first quarter of 2026." He added that

the entire process, including structuring the business among

operators, could take over four years.

A person familiar with the matter told Reuters that Orange,

the market leader in France, believes it has enough capital to

submit offers both for Altice's assets and the remaining stake

in Spanish operator MasOrange it does not hold, because it has a

lot of cash at hand.

Earlier in October, Altice France closed its 24 billion-euro

debt restructuring, which was expected to pave the way for a

sale of its telecoms unit SFR.

Bouygues' U.S.-listed American Depositary Receipts were

trading up 2.6% at $9.03.

($1 = 0.8619 euro)