Carphone Warehouse, Europe’s biggest mobile phone retailer, has more than doubled its residential telephone customer base with two acquisitions that will make it the UK’s 3rd largest provider of fixed-line telephony.
Carphone has agreed to buy Onetel from energy company Centrica for £132m ($233m) in cash, and to buy Tele2’s UK and Irish businesses for £8.5m ($15M).
The retailer already has more than 1m customers for its TalkTalk business, which sells fixed-line telephone services based on a BT wholesale access product. It will gain another 1.4m customers from OneTel and 224,000 customers from Tele2.
This is a shrewd move by Carphone and the deals look good value. Apparently Carphone was the only real bidder given how unpopular fixed line telephony assets remain. More interesting will be to see how Carphone develop their broadband business. Without that these assets could soon dwindle even further in value.
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