NEW YORK, December 31, 2025, 03:53 ET
- Vodafone shares traded around 99 pence on Wednesday, hovering just below the £1 mark.
- Vodafone said it repurchased 12.38 million shares in its latest tranche of an ongoing buyback programme.
- A Simply Wall St analysis published last week put fair value below the recent close and showed most analyst price targets under £1.
Vodafone shares hovered just below the £1 level on Wednesday, trading at about 99.22 pence in London, as the telecoms group continued a steady run of share buybacks into year-end. ( Investing)
The move matters because the one-pound mark is a psychological threshold for retail and institutional investors in the U.K., where Vodafone is a heavyweight in the FTSE 100.
It also comes as trading volumes thin out around the holidays, making price levels and corporate buying programmes more visible in daily market moves.
In a regulatory filing on Tuesday, Vodafone said it repurchased 12,383,048 ordinary shares on Dec. 29 at prices between 96.60 pence and 98.02 pence, paying a volume-weighted average price of 97.62 pence. A buyback is when a company repurchases its own shares; treasury shares are typically not entitled to dividends and carry no voting rights. ( Ft)
Vodafone said it would hold the shares in treasury, taking its treasury holdings to 1,352,076,203 shares, with 23,525,884,554 shares in issue excluding treasury stock, the filing showed.
The stock ended Tuesday at 98.54 pence and remained about 10% below its 52-week high of £1.09 set on Dec. 19, MarketWatch data showed.
A Yahoo Finance UK column published this week said Vodafone was trading close to its 2025 highs and “might only be weeks” from reaching the £1 level. ( Yahoo)
Not everyone sees more upside at current levels. In an analysis published Dec. 22, Simply Wall St said its most-followed “narrative” put Vodafone’s fair value at about 90 pence, and cited a consensus analyst price target of £0.858, with estimates ranging from £0.60 to £1.36. ( Simplywall)
The same analysis said Vodafone traded at about 0.7 times sales versus an “industry average” closer to 1.6 times, suggesting the market still prices in execution risk even after the recent rally.
Simply Wall St also pointed to weak execution in Germany and the complexity of large-scale restructuring as factors that could derail margin improvements assumed by more optimistic forecasts.
Vodafone competes with BT Group’s EE and Hutchison’s Three in the U.K. market, and faces European rivals including Orange and Telefónica across its footprint.
