Telecoms antitrust decision sends chills from UK to Italy

Decision signals trouble for two of Hutchison Whampoa deals that will need EC approval.

The European Commission harpooned a telecoms merger Friday, signaling danger to other operators in the U.K. and Italy about the safety of their own deals in the works.

TeliaSonera and Telenor abandoned plans to merge their Danish operations after the Commission said the assets they were willing to sell, in exchange for a green light, were not enough to guarantee competition.

That could trigger alarm bells in the U.K. headquarters of Hutchison Whampoa, which wants to merge its Three brand with O2, and likewise with its operations in Italy with Wind. Both deals will need EU approval.

In the Danish deal, Commissioner Margrethe Vestager demanded TeliaSonera and Telenor create a new, self-standing mobile phone operator.

“What the parties offered was not sufficient to avoid harm to competition,” she said.

Her refusal raises the bar and could cool, if not freeze, consolidation in the mobile phone sector within domestic borders, said Innocenzo Genna, a Brussels-based telecoms consultant.

Vestager appears to be taking a harder stand than her predecessor, Joaquín Almunia, who ran the antitrust section from 2010 to 2014.

Alumnia signed off on Telefónica’s €8.6 billion bid for KPN’s German unit, in return for leasing network capacity to a new entrant. That decision is now being challenged by Airdata, a regional mobile broadband provider in Germany, before the EU courts.

“Neither Almunia’s [wholesale access] remedy in German and Ireland nor the exotic joint venture proposed remedies by Telenor and TeliaSonera in Denmark can remove the competitions  concerns entirely in a four-to-three mobile consolidation,” said Antonios Drossos, managing partner at Rewheel, a telecoms consultancy.

Since 2012, the Commission has approved three mergers that have decreased the number of mobile operators in the market to three from four. The impact on consumers and competitors appears mixed.

“They are starting to see the effects [of previous mergers] in Austria, Germany and Ireland,” said Genna, the telecoms analyst.

National regulators in Austria, where two telecom companies merged in 2012, for example, have expressed concern that the unions reduced competition and led to higher prices.

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However, UBS analysts wrote in a research note they did “not think this necessarily represents an end to further consolidation in the sector; rather, the issues may be specific to Denmark…”

Christian Luiga, TeliaSonera’s chief financial officer, told shareholders Friday the companies have decided to merge their mobile businesses in Denmark because of the sector’s low margins and declining levels of investment. That situation remains unchanged.

His remarks were echoed by Steven Tas, the chairman of the European Telecom Network Operators, which represents the largest operators: “This is a missed opportunity. Europe needs massive deployment of superfast-broadband. Only stronger players can deliver significantly higher levels of investments in networks and technology.”