EMEA in Perspective, 11 August

EMEA in perspective is a Monday column focused on the identification of regional trends and outcomes of the prior week’s news. Claudia Bacco, Managing Director – EMEA, has spent her entire career in telecom, IT and Security. Having experience at an operator, software and hardware vendors and as a well-known industry analyst, she has many opinions on the market. She’ll be sharing those opinions along with ongoing trend analysis for RCR Wireless through daily contributions going forward.
There was a lot of matchmaking going on with the European operators this week. And a lot of this matchmaking involved crossing oceans.
The Irish Times reported that AT&T is considering a bid on Eircom as a low-cost route into Europe. Eircom is a fixed and mobile telecommunications provider and has annual revenues of about €1.3 billion from about 2 million retail customers. The operator has been cutting costs and restructuring of late and needs to make some decisions about its future.
It seems both Telefonica and Telecom Italia are feeling the love for GVT Vivendi in Brazil. On Tuesday, Telefonica offered €6.7 billion for the Brazilian Internet provider. Although Vivendi has said the unit is not for sale but will consider this offer, it doesn’t seem anyone is listening because on Friday Telecom Italia discussed a counterbid to this offer which would allow a stake in Telecom Italia for Vivendi. Although this latter deal has been discussed in previous times, it has not moved forward.
It would have been hard to miss the love triangle this week between Deutsche Telekom/T-Mobile, Iliad from France and Sprint. Just to recap – Deutsche Telekom has put its stake in T-Mobile US up for sale, with the retention of a minority stake. Sprint had been in the running and decided to back off. Earlier, a $15 billion offer from French Iliad was rejected. But now on the heels of Sprint’s reversal, Iliad is looking interesting. Rumors speculate that Iliad will bring in bid partners from the U.S. cable and satellite industry, which could make this all the more interesting. I’m not sure if this feels like a romance novel or a game of pingpong.
Also in the news this week, the Netherlands. Gemalto has agreed to acquire SafeNet. This is a U.S. company that offers data and application protection. The deal is valued at $890 million. SafeNet secures more than 80% of the world’s intra-bank funds transfers. This will expand Gemalto’s ability to secure sensitive digital data in an online world. According to Gemalto, in 2014 to date, 400 million digital data records have already been stolen.
More from the Netherlands in the form of a proposed cable operator acquisition. Liberty Global has had a bid in place for Ziggo, a Dutch cable operator. The EU has been investigating this proposal for potential antitrust violations. The investigation was halted this week to allow for Liberty Global to provide additional information to address their concerns. To date, Liberty Global has agreed to divest its pay TV channel Film1 and not block over-the-top (OTT) players such as Netflix from its network for a period of four years in order to pacify concerns. Although the concern still remains that if the amount of competition is reduced in the Netherlands, consumer prices might rise.
That’s it for today, a busy week last week, let’s see what we have ahead of us for the next five days.