Tuesday 30 June 2009

Orange and Vodafone Bid for T-mobile

Mobile phone company T-Mobile is owned by Deutsche Telekom but might not be for much longer. Both Orange and Vodafone have expressed an interest in taking over the company. T Mobile has been under performing recently despite the appointment of a new MD but is not yet in the position of having to sell up in a hurry.

T-Mobile is the 3rd largest mobile phone company in the UK with around 19.2 million subscribers. Vodafone is the largest provider and Orange the 4th largest. Whoever is successful in their bid is likely to become the largest mobile phone operator in the UK by inheriting T-Mobile's massive user base.

If either Orange or Vodafone are successful in their takeover bids then the big five Mobile Phone providers in the UK will become the big four. Some have speculated that this will be bad news for consumers as it will result in less competition. Personally I believe that having one provider with double the amount of subscribers will mean that other companies will be forced to bring out some eye catching deals in order to compete. This would potentially be good for the consumer who is used to getting more for their money each year as it is.

Three mobile have already taken the big step of introducing free Skype-to-Skype calls as well as free Three-to-Three calls for most packages. It will be interesting to see how the other four (soon to be three?) providers compete with this.

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