Spanish government approves Orange-MásMóvil merger

Source: MásMóvil

The Spanish government has approved the merger of Orange España with MásMóvil, paving a way for a realignment of the highly competitive Spanish TV operator market.

Speaking at a news conference, Spanish digital transformation minister José Luis Escriva said that the new combined operator had a “truly ambitious” plan to invest in fixed and mobile networks in the country.

The merger of Spain’s number two and four telecom operators has already received a green light from the EC. That approval was conditional on MásMóvil selling spectrum assets to Romania-based alternative telco Digi, enabling the latter to move from being a pure MVNO to building its owned and operated mobile network.

MásMóvil must divest spectrum in the 1,800MHz, 2m100MHz and 3.5GHz bands to Digi.

Orange and MásMóvil must also enter an optional national roaming agreement, which Digi can decide to use or not. This is to enable Digi to provide national mobile coverage as any future network it builds on its own will not cover the entire national territory.

The remedy commitments do not include any fixed assets as Digi already has substantial fixed fibre network in the country, which it is continuing to build.

The JV that will result from the government’s green light will create a new market leader in Spain in terms of number of customers, with over 30 million mobile services, 3.7 million broadband customers and 2.2 million TV customers. The combined operator will have revenues of over €7.4 billion and EBITDAaL of €2.3 billion, with an enterprise value of about €18.6 billion.