The purchases come amid more oil shipments transiting the Strait of Hormuz, following the US-Iran ceasefire earlier in June 2026. However, the weak demand in Asia has freed up more Middle Eastern crude supply for other regions.

“Dangote imported one cargo of Umm Lulu crude and another ‌of either Das ⁠or Murban ⁠crude in June. The refinery receives about five to seven crude cargoes a month from Nigeria’s state-owned NNPC, benefiting from lower shipping costs, but has previously said it requires about 13 to 15 cargoes per month,” reported Reuters.

As per the Kpler data, the Dangote refinery, which has turned into a major exporter of middle distillates ‌to Europe due to fuel shortages linked ⁠to disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, also sourced up to 65,000 bpd of Libyan crude in May.

The two UAE cargoes, confirmed by S&P Global Commodity Insights on June 29, will arrive at Dangote’s Lekki facility in the coming weeks. Since the beginning of its commercial operations in early 2024, the facility has drawn its crude almost exclusively from Nigeria, the United States, and other Atlantic Basin suppliers. In 2025, approximately 70% of its imports originated from Nigeria under the naira-for-crude arrangement the African country’s federal government struck with the Dangote Group. The remaining 30% was split primarily between US grades.

In 2026, the refinery diversified its import options further, receiving cargoes from Angola, Ghana, Libya, and Guyana alongside domestic Nigerian supply. The UAE purchase marks the first time any Middle Eastern crude has been added to that growing roster.

The import by Dangote also serves as a double delight for the UAE’s crude grades, as the development, along with the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, has brought the commodities back into the global supply picture at competitive prices. Benchmark UAE Murban crude was trading at approximately USD 66.40 per barrel on June 26, nearly USD 6 below pre-Iran war levels, making Middle Eastern grades an increasingly attractive option for a merchant refinery trying to widen the range of crude it can profitably process.

CEO David Bird, who joined Dangote in 2025 after two years running Oman’s Duqm refinery, wants to more than triple the number of crude grades the facility can process from approximately the current capacity of 40 to more than 120 in the coming years. The UAE’s key export grades, including Murban, Das Blend, Umm Lulu, and Upper Zakum, are broadly compatible with the refinery’s distillation unit configuration and would add significant flexibility to a facility currently running at full nameplate capacity of 650,000 barrels per day.

“The naira-for-crude agreement between NNPC and the refinery has guaranteed 13 to 15 cargoes of Nigerian crude monthly, helping to reduce the refinery’s foreign exchange exposure on the bulk of its feedstock. But that arrangement has faced persistent operational headwinds. Inadequate crude availability at export terminals and recurring technical issues at key loading points have compelled the refinery to seek additional crude sources outside Nigeria on a regular basis, a situation that Bird acknowledged had accelerated the timeline for building out the international procurement infrastructure. The UAE cargoes are the most visible expression yet of that imperative,” reported Billionaires Africa.

The Dangote refinery has already confirmed plans to double its processing capacity to approximately 1.4 million barrels per day by 2028, a level that would allow the business to process approximately 80% of Nigeria’s entire daily crude oil production in a single day. However, the drawback with the approach is that, going by things, domestic Nigerian crude supply will become structurally insufficient to feed the expanded facility and international sourcing at scale will become a permanent operational requirement rather than a supplementary buffer.

“The Middle East has historically been one of the primary sources of refined petroleum products imported into West and Central Africa. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and India together accounted for the majority of the region’s refined fuel imports before the Dangote Refinery began reshaping those trade flows. The refinery is now not only displacing Middle Eastern refined product imports across African markets but also beginning to buy raw crude from those same Middle Eastern producers to process in Nigeria. The direction of the trade is reversing,” Billionaires Africa concluded.

The post Nigeria’s Dangote refinery imports crude from UAE’s ADNOC for first time appeared first on International Finance.

The numbers tell part of the turbulent story. Since she took charge, BT’s share price has climbed by roughly 70% to 80%, a striking turnaround for a stock that had spent years drifting lower. Her own compensation has grown alongside it. In the year to March 2026, Kirkby’s total pay package more than doubled to 5.6 million pounds, made up of salary and benefits, an annual bonus and a large tranche of long-term share awards that reflect BT’s improved market value. It is now the largest pay packet handed to a telecoms boss in Britain in more than a decade, and it has drawn criticism from unions and campaigners who point out that the reward has come alongside tens of thousands of job losses.

Kirkby’s approach has been built on a simple premise. BT’s predecessor, Philip Jansen, spent billions building out full-fibre broadband across the European country, a huge and expensive bet on the United Kingdom’s digital future. Kirkby arrived just as that spending was nearing its peak, which allowed her to start dialling it back and shift the company’s focus toward harvesting returns from the network rather than continuing to build it at the same pace.

She set out to strip three billion pounds of costs from the business by 2029 and has since raised that target to 3.7 billion pounds by 2030, extending the programme by a year. BT has already delivered 1.5 billion pounds of annual savings, and its overall workforce has fallen by around seven per cent in the past year alone, down to roughly 108,000 employees. By the end of the decade, the combined headcount across BT is expected to settle somewhere between 75,000 and 80,000, toward the lower end of a range first floated back in 2023.

That scale of cost-cutting has not been without pain, but it has won over the city. BT’s revenue for the last financial year came in at 19.7 billion pounds, a modest decline from the year before, yet pre-tax profit rose 8% to 1.4 billion pounds. The company has also unveiled a new policy on returning cash to shareholders, and it maintains that it is transforming ahead of schedule, even as it juggles network investment, dividends and further restructuring.

The most significant recent move has been the agreement with Verizon to combine the two companies’ international enterprise businesses into a new joint venture. The deal brings together BT International and Verizon’s international enterprise wireline arm into a single platform designed to serve large multinational clients who need secure, reliable connections that work seamlessly across borders and cloud systems.

The new venture will serve more than 3,000 customers in over 180 countries and will generate close to four billion US dollars in combined annual revenue. Both companies will hold equal stakes and equal voting rights, and Verizon has agreed to pay BT roughly 625 million dollars to balance the value each side is contributing. The venture will be headquartered in the United Kingdom, though technically incorporated in Jersey, and a former telecoms executive, Martijn Blanken, has been named as its incoming chief executive once the deal closes, expected sometime in 2027.

For BT, the logic is straightforward. Running a sprawling international network on its own had become an expensive distraction from its core British business, where the real profits lie. By pooling resources with Verizon, BT gets scale without having to carry the full cost, and it can redirect management attention and capital back toward broadband and mobile services at home. It is, in effect, an admission that going it alone internationally no longer makes sense in a world where multinational clients want a single, AI-ready network that spans continents.

Even so, Kirkby’s challenges are far from over. As BT marks its 180th anniversary this year, the competitive landscape at home has grown noticeably tougher. The merger of Vodafone and Three has created a powerful new mobile rival with the scale to compete aggressively on price and network coverage. At the same time, a wave of smaller “alt-net” broadband providers has been chipping away at BT’s fibre market share in towns and cities across the country, undercutting on price even as BT pours money into laying cable. As the company’s fibre rollout nears completion, Kirkby must answer a harder question, namely what BT actually stands for once the building phase is over and the business shifts into a slower, more competitive growth phase.

There have also been governance tensions closer to home. Sunil Bharti Mittal, the Indian telecoms billionaire who is now BT’s largest shareholder, has taken a board seat and is reportedly pushing Kirkby and chairman Adam Crozier for stronger performance, particularly around market share, which has continued to slip in key segments. A recent rebrand and a significant clear-out of the boardroom have added to a sense of flux rather than settling nerves.

On the international side, the Verizon venture still needs regulatory clearance in multiple jurisdictions before it can close, and integrating two large, previously separate operations is rarely simple. There is also a broader question of how much genuine growth the new venture can generate once cost savings from combining the businesses have been captured, since neither BT nor Verizon is treating this as an aggressive expansion play so much as a tidying up of assets that had become hard to justify running independently.

Kirkby’s supporters argue she inherited good timing along with a difficult job, taking over just as BT’s heaviest spending was behind it. Her critics say the turnaround so far has largely confirmed a strategy already in motion rather than charting a genuinely new course. What is not in dispute is that the easy part, cutting costs and reassuring the market, is largely done. The harder task, proving that a 180-year-old telecoms giant can still grow in a crowded and fast-changing global market, is only just beginning.

Image Credit: BT

The post Business Leader of the Week: Allison Kirkby rewires BT’s comeback journey appeared first on International Finance.

“Verizon has agreed to pay BT an equalisation payment of usd 625 million, and both companies will hold equal voting rights in the new venture, which will serve more than 3,000 customers in over ⁠180 countries,” the companies said in a joint statement.

“This is a very fragmented market, and this could be the start of further consolidation. We could possibly look to bring in third parties at some point in the future,” BT Chief Executive Allison Kirkby told Reuters.

The deal also marks a milestone for Kirkby, who has been steadily refocusing the 180-year-old British telecoms group on its home market while shedding international assets. Kirkby, who had been a BT board member, took the helm of the struggling venture in February 2024. Since then, she has overseen a multibillion-pound cost-cutting program across BT’s business.

Under her watch, while BT is looking to raise its savings target from 3 billion pounds by 2029 to 3.7 billion by 2030, its combined headcount, by the decade’s end, will likely remain at between 75,000 and 80,000, towards the lower end of an estimated range of 75,000 to 90,000 decided in 2023.

In 2025, Kirkby’s pay and bonus package more than doubled to 5.6 million pounds, a compensation that became the biggest pay award to a telecom boss in more than a decade. Shares in BT, on the other hand, have risen by more than 70% since she started in her leadership role.

Verizon CEO Dan Schulman, who has been aggressively pushing his own turnaround strategy at the American wireless carrier, termed the venture “the clear answer” for international customers seeking secure and ‌flexible ⁠connectivity that will be effective across borders and cloud environments.

Verizon, which announced its cost-cutting in November 2025, will scrap about 13,000 jobs across the organization in the coming days, a move that Schulman has justified as “intended to simplify our operations to address the complexity and friction that slow us down and frustrate our customers.”

Martijn Blanken, a former executive at Australia’s Telstra and Netherlands-based KPN, has been named as the CEO-designate of the new company. He will join BT Group in September 2026 and work with both parent companies to launch the combined entity’s operations.

“We see ⁠this as a unique opportunity to create a scaled player to serve our multinational customers much better,” Kirkby said, adding that the two companies’ customer footprints were complementary, with only the odd overlap.

The Verizon deal will serve as a timely boost for BT, which, as per the reports, has been encountering weakness in its international business, which, in turn, has been ⁠a drag on the company’s earnings. BT is also reviving talks with firms such as AT&T and Orange to turn things around in the overseas market through partnership vehicles.

“The USD 625 million ⁠payment to BT will be used to fund the venture, and any remaining amount will be used to pay down debt,” Kirkby said.

The post BT, Verizon launch equal-stake global joint venture, to serve over 180 markets appeared first on International Finance.

Both Liberty Global and Telefonica will own 50 percent each of the new joint venture, which will be valued at around $38 billion. The board of directors for the new company will have eight members four O2 and four from Virgin.

The chairman’s position for the new company will be altered every two years.

The joint venture will compete directly with BT, which is the only operator in the UK to own both a mobile and fixed network, and it’s been investing to upgrade to fiber-optic broadband.

The companies expect total synergies of £6.2 billion after integration costs of an estimated £700 million.

The deal between Virgin and O2, which started last December, is expected to reshape the telecom sector in the UK as it brings together the second-largest broadband network with the largest mobile network, which has 26 million direct customers and 34 million non-direct clients, via brands such as Tesco Mobile and business users.

Jose Maria Alvarez-Pallete, chairman and chief executive of Telefonica told the media, “Combining O2’s number one mobile business with Virgin Media’s superfast broadband network and entertainment services will be a game-changer in the UK, at a time when demand for connectivity has never been greater or more critical.”

According to the Financial Times, Telefonica will receive £5.7 billion in cash to help it reduce its heavy debt position along with an equalising payment from Liberty Global of £2.5 billion reflecting Virgin Media’s £11.3 billion of debt.

The post Virgin, O2 join hands to create UK’s largest telco appeared first on International Finance.

The UK’s core 5G infrastructure will hold sensitive customers’ data. The technology giant will be allowed to deploy its equipment across other parts of the 5G network. 

According to media reports, the British government is already using Huawei equipment. A source told the media that, “The technical and policy guidance hasn’t changed. Now it is down to a political calculation.”

The UK’s largest telecom operators BT and Vodafone have opposed the idea of a full ban on Huawei. In fact, Vodafone uses Huawei in select parts of its network. Last year, the telecom giant decided to stall Huawei’s deployment in its core 5G network until it receives a complete security clearance from Western governments

Even BT uses Huawei equipment in networks away from the core. However, it excluded the Chinese technology giant from its 5G bidding process in the future. 

According to the industry, the UK might flag Huawei as a high risk vendor and impose further restrictions, such as limiting its market value. The final decision on the matter will be made during the National Security Council next week. Speculation is that former British Prime Minister Theresa May had approved Huawei to be a part of the country’s non-core 5G infrastructure. 

The post The UK might allow Huawei to play a minimal role in its 5G network appeared first on International Finance.