The tender offer for bonds launched by France Telecom closed on 18 November with EUR 1.963 billion of orders received representing a high hit rate of 36% of the total targeted bonds (4.625% January 2012, 4.375% February 2012 and 7.25% January 2013).

In line with its initial objective, France Telecom has limited the amount of bonds bought back to EUR 1 billion (EUR 160 million due January 2012, EUR 416 million due February 2012 and EUR 424 million due January 2013).

Moreover, France Telecom has finalised the refinancing of this EUR 1 billion tender with the placement today of a EUR 750 million 10-year bond. This placement followed that of 16 November of a GBP 250 million 40-year bond swapped into EUR at 4.46%.

The conditions for this placement are as follows:

This tender offer and the two new placements were carried out in line with the liability management strategy initiated by the Group one year ago with, in particular, the early redemption in September 2010 through a make-whole call of its 7.75%-USD bonds, which were due to reach maturity in March 2011. In total, this debt optimization strategy represents a volume of more than EUR 5 billion of bonds as of today and allows the Group to continue to take advantage of very low interest rates while extending its average debt maturity, which has now been increased by 0.6 years.

BNP Paribas, Crédit Suisse and Société Générale acted as bookrunners of the EUR bond issue while BNP Paribas and Société Générale acted as dealer managers of the tender offer.