Tele2 Denmark: Another MVNO Bites the Dust

Tele2 is selling up in Denmark. It has sold all its various assets to Telenor for SEK1025m which sounds a lot but actually only is £76m. Telenor picked up for this bargain price:

At the end of 2006, Tele2 Denmark had according to National IT & Telecom Agency 75,000 broadband customers, 206,000 fixed telephony customer and 227,000 mobile telephony customers of which 100,000 post-paid. In 2006 the Danish business had revenues of MSEK 1,695 and EBITDA of MSEK 68.

Also bear in mind that the Telenor Danish arm, Sonofon, was the carrier for the Tele2 customers and therefore has most to gain from keeping the customers on-net. Telenor also acquired in 2004 another Danish MVNO called CBB Mobil which still to this day trades under its own brand name.

I also presume that Telenor will leave the management of the broadband base to its CyberCity acquisition from 2005.

Cybercity is Denmark's third largest provider of broadband services. The company has approximately 90,000 customers, and a market share of 8 per cent. Cybercity provides services primarily to the consumer and SME markets, and the company's infrastructure covers 70 per cent of the Danish territory.

Telenor paid NOK 1,385 million on a debt free basis for Cybercity. Note that NOK1385m is around £116m in today’s money and CyberCity has grown its base to around 175k customers at the end of 2006.

After this acquisition, the Telenor market shares (by customer at the end of 2006) will be around:

• Broadband share 14.5% compared to the incumbent’s TDC share of 56.6%;
• Mobile share 27.9% (including CBB) compared to the incumbent’s TDC share of 40.8% (including Telmore);
• the leading altnet for the fixed market with 13.8% of outgoing traffic compared to the incumbent's TDC share of 65.6%.

Note: all subscriber statistics from the Danish regulator, whose bi-annual report also contains a lot of traffic data for anyone really interested in delving deeper into the falling values of MVNOs and Broadband assets in Denmark.