EU approve Orange T-Mobile merger

Conditions accepted

The Orange T-Mobile 50/50 deal as discussed previously has been accepted by the European Commission, and the UK Office of Fair Trading has withdrawn its objections, Reuters report.

France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom can proceed with merging their UK operations, on condition of expanding the existing network sharing agreement T-Mobile has with 3. The combined company must also hand back a quarter of its assigned 1800 MHz radio spectrum. The paper should be signed in the Spring, followed by both brands running in parallel for up to 18 months.

FT and DT’s new business will be catapulted to a 37% market share, with the companies expecting to save around €4 billion through synergies and economies of scale, i.e. cuts.

Originally published at OneMobileRing.com