BT in talks to buy EE for £12.5bn

[4me2]

BT in talks to buy EE for £12.5bn




Telecoms giant BT is in exclusive talks to buy EE - Britain's largest mobile network group - for £12.5bn.

It said the period of exclusivity would last "several weeks" to enable it to carry out the necessary negotiations.
In late November, BT said it was in talks to buy either EE or O2, which is owned by Spanish firm Telefonica.
"The proposed acquisition would enable BT to accelerate its existing mobility strategy," BT said in a statement.
Under the terms of the proposed deal, EE's owners Germany's Deutsche Telekom and France's Orange would take a 12% and 4% stake in BT respectively.
Deutsche Telekom would also be entitled to appoint one member to the board, BT said.
A takeover of EE would create a communications giant covering fixed-line phones, broadband, mobile and TV.


IT savings

EE leads the market in 4G (the fastest mobile bandwidth), has 24.5 million customers, and holds 33.8% of the UK mobile market by revenue, according to Citigroup.
BT said owning EE would accelerate its plan of giving customers seamless access to the Internet whether via fibre broadband, wi-fi hotspots or 4G mobile services.
BT said it also expected "significant synergies" through the deal, with savings on IT and back office costs as well as marketing and sales expenses.
It said it would also be able to sell its fixed line services to EE customers who did not yet take a service from BT.
EE's owners put plans for an initial public offering of EE on hold this year.


Other plans

BT spun off its own mobile network, BT Cellnet, now O2, in 2002. In 2005 it was acquired by Spain's Telefonica for £17.7bn.
Despite the talks, BT said it would continue with its own plans for providing mobile services to businesses and consumers, and said it "remains confident" of delivering on its plans if the deal with EE falls through.
Dominic Baliszewski, telecoms expert at comparison website broadbandchoices.co.uk said if the deal went through, customers could see cheaper deals.
"BT has the infrastructure at its disposal to offer some truly compelling pricing alongside robust coverage (both from EE's best-in-market UK mobile coverage and BT's 5 million Wi-Fi hotspots)."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-30487285

[Rick Sanchez]

Great news!

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

[Zippeyrude]

i hate BT with a vengeance, a company with disgusting customer support and arrogance to go with it too.

[4me2]

The cunts should be using this money to ensure everyone has fibre.

Where the fuck are they just going to get 12.5 billion from ?

[4me2]

i hate BT with a vengeance, a company with disgusting customer support and arrogance to go with it too.

Agreed.

[evilsatan]

I always wondered why BT sold its mobile business in the first place. Looks like BT are trying to compete in all markets now, I assume this will be great for the consumer in the short term at least.

[4me2]

I always wondered why BT sold its mobile business in the first place. Looks like BT are trying to compete in all markets now, I assume this will be great for the consumer in the short term at least.

I think it's because within the next 10 years we will have 5G and all cable connections apart from under seas will be obsolete.

[Zippeyrude]

The cunts should be using this money to ensure everyone has fibre.

Where the fuck are they just going to get 12.5 billion from ?

by ripping people off by charging then £16 a month for the privilege of having a land line just so that non cable people can have broadband.

a wasted £16 a month as no fucker uses land lines anymore...

a complete rip off.

[4me2]

by ripping people off by charging then £16 a month for the privilege of having a land line just so that non cable people can have broadband.

a wasted £16 a month as no fucker uses land lines anymore...

a complete rip off.

Not to mention the millions given to them by Cunteron to give people fibre which they have failed to do in all rural areas.

[Over Carl]

One of my biggest complaints that they rolled out a whole heap of kit as their plan get their network ready for the 21st century. Not even 15% through the 21st century and we can only dream of services people in far less developed nations take for granted. Apparently one of my mate's business has terrible internet and they've recently found out the problem is the exchange doesn't have enough bandwidth to support the number customers connected and virgin won't cover the area so they are royally shafted.

So seeing as we've just had the big upgrade for the new century, this makes me have a horrible suspicion BT may massively run out of bandwidth in the future having a massive knock on effect on other providers, causing the whole country to return to effective dial up speeds at which time they will probably just ban any form of interesting downloads and blame it all on us lot for using p2p.

If we consider the download and upload speeds commonly available via mobile phones and the prices paid, Infinity should be around £10/pm including the phone line rental and BT should be too embarrased to even offer ADSL anymore.

After fucking up that badly, serious questions should be asked but in the typical english approach we all just quietly put up with it and those that decided to hurt the future of BT and the whole country probably got paid massive bonuses to do so.

I've read a few times that another major problem is that BT own a lot of fibre. They are obliged to rent out to other companies, but they won't hire out dark fibre (i.e. just a fibre with no transcievers on either end), they only wish to rent the fibre with the transceivers at rates going upwards depending on bandwidth.

Now back to this O2 thingy - I remember realising myself that selling Cellnet was a daft move for BT. I wouldn't be surprised if consultants took millions to advise Cellnet should be sold. This is one of the biggest things wrong with this country.

[k11jrp]

Fantastic news. Hopefully the share price will reflect this. Took on sky and now mobiles

[baggy13]

Mixed feeling as already said been with orange since 94 but hate bt with a passion. Customer services with ee have been dire for years ever since France telecom took them over.

[Mobileman]

EE imo were messing the job up hopefully this will bring some much need change within the company , it will bring some competition interms of 4 on one bill .
Also in next few weeks expect to see Vodafone and sky to cement a deal

[piggzy]

I always wondered why BT sold its mobile business in the first place. Looks like BT are trying to compete in all markets now, I assume this will be great for the consumer in the short term at least.

They were pretty much forced into it at the time due to being billions in debt and pressure from shareholders e.t.c


Do think BT might do a better job than EE to be fair. EE have been fucking it up big time imho