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T-Mobile and Orange merger: It’s official

The BBC are reporting the rumoured merger between Deutsche Telekom’s UK mobile unit T-Mobile and France Telecom’s Orange is on – with the two companies planning to create a ‘super-operator’ by November.

The new combined unit would bring in around £8.2bn worth of sales, and hoover up 37% of the UK market – more than O2’s current lead at 27%. Costs associated with the merger could reach £800m though, but savings are expected to be £445m by 2014.

All of this is, of course, subject to regulatory approval. However, it does leave lots of unanswered questions – for instance what happens with existing joint ventures like T-Mobile’s MVNO with Virgin, and their 3G network sharing deal with 3? Plus there’s the big dark cloud over jobs – how many redundancies will such a merger cause?

28 COMMENTS

  1. Dominic,

    Your not up with your understanding of their networks. T-Mobile and 3 have a shared 3G network! they actually share the equipment and are making massive savings on duplication of footprints, exploiting each others positions of strength and decommissioning duplicated sites.

    With Orange on board they will have a stronger 2G footprint that has been a weakness for them both sets of customers will be able to roam at each others own network rates.

    This will be a very strong and powerful company.

  2. Assuming your pointing this comment at me, what are you refering to?
    This network integration between the two cannot come soon enough for me, keeping the sharing with 3UK would be a total bonus. I currently have live SIM cards on both and know where the weak spots are in the various locations I commonly visit,

    We're all singing “do do do the Flexy Gibbon” round the office in speculation at the integration of tariff nomenclature

  3. Dominic,

    Your not up with your understanding of their networks. T-Mobile and 3 have a shared 3G network! they actually share the equipment and are making massive savings on duplication of footprints, exploiting each others positions of strength and decommissioning duplicated sites.

    With Orange on board they will have a stronger 2G footprint that has been a weakness for them both sets of customers will be able to roam at each others own network rates.

    This will be a very strong and powerful company.

  4. Assuming your pointing this comment at me, what are you refering to?
    This network integration between the two cannot come soon enough for me, keeping the sharing with 3UK would be a total bonus. I currently have live SIM cards on both and know where the weak spots are in the various locations I commonly visit,

    We're all singing “do do do the Flexy Gibbon” round the office in speculation at the integration of tariff nomenclature

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