Originally Posted by Thine Wonk:
“Yeah it's good isn't it when a HK based company which has invested heavily in the UK for 14 years, mostly at their own loss wants to continue to specialise just in mobile and to buy up a company from a parent who wants to exit, but it's blocked.
So what will happen is it'll force them to exit and then your real private equity asset strippers will come in and milk it for all it's worth or it'll go to a telecoms company like Virgin Media who'll just sell it as yet another thing and their project roadmap will have to be split between their fibre network, their business customers, their ISP, their phone service, their gov contracts and oh year, the mobile business too. Where's the new fibre rollout they promised to new areas? Nowhere, hasn't happened.
BT has been criticised for ignoring areas, the pair of them have been acting against the interests of consumers eg: BT rolling out areas where Virgin had fibre already first, yet BT is allowed to swallow up EE and add to their already huge dominance.
Three has invested in growing that UK business for little return, they have innovated and pushed in areas like mobile broadband, unlimited data, and elsewhere, for the smallest operator they push 42% of the UK's mobile data, which is the largest amount of any of the networks.
They didn't have the budget that the combined O2 / VF had for 4G, or EE because of the smaller customer base, that's one of the issues, it is hard to compete in the UK being the smallest provider with 9M customers. That's exactly why they want this merger / sale, because if this doesn't happen then in today's market with limited smartphone growth and margins squeezed it just isn't worth being in the market as a standalone 9M telecoms business, no wonder they didn't put the money YOU wanted them to put into 4G.
This year they'll make a pretax £300M profit, they invested £500M in 4G, if they had invested the £1BN that O2 & Vodafone did, then they would have made a loss of £200M. All this will be put before the people making the decision about the merger and hopefully they will see sense if they want to secure the future and set a fair competition platform for all.
How it can be OK for a massive group like BT to consume a huge mobile operator, but not for the UK's smallest network to be absorbed goodness knows. When you look at it from Three and O2's point of view they do have a valid case, you need scale.
There are many reasons why prices have increased recently, a lot of it is to do with the ending of charges for 0800, termination rates, data usage rocketing, expensive 4G spectrum purchase and rollout and the new spectrum fees from Ofcom, not to mention the arbitration fees that they have to pay now and many other things.
The money needs to be there to invest in the network, £15 doesn't buy a lot of hardware these days, that was the 2012 pricing, yes it's gone up, but still competitive, the people complaining can't actually get those prices or allowances from others in most cases.
Has there been an uproar since the merger in Ireland? No
Have the prices increased significantly? No
What they have done is some big new sponsorship, some new investment and a 1M Euro anti-homessness campaign. Three's chairman is actually one of the worlds biggest philanthropists who has given millions away, including to the UK to fund hospital equipment etc and who believes in a culture of doing good.”
If you replace "Three UK" with "O2" you nearly have a wavejockglw tribute post on your hands!