Auditel Consultant:
Peter Harrison

Orange & T-Mobile merger to go ahead

04 Mar 2010 | Filed under: Communications

Orange and T-Mobile’s proposal of a merger has been approved by European regulators, resulting in a combined UK customer base of around 30 million users. The integration will start immediately and is expected to be completed within the next few months.

So what does this mean for customers? Well for the next 18 months or so they will continue to operate as separate brands, but with a single back office and one consolidated network servicing both brands. Beyond that they are likely to re-brand as a single entity. The press announcements have been talking vaguely about “synergies”, “cost savings”, “outstanding high-speed mobile broadband network” and “customer benefits”. But right now all we can say is that the UK has a new market share leader in the Mobile sector and there is a little less genuine competition. It will certainly be interesting to see how pricing differs between the two brands over the coming year and how the other big players, Vodafone and O2, react to the merger.