Liberty Global this week submitted concessions to the European Commission in a bid to secure regulatory approval for its €1.33 billion acquisition of KPN’s Belgian unit Base.
According to the EU’s Website, the commitments were filed on Monday. Specific information about the concessions was not disclosed. The Commission will decide by 5 October whether to launch an in-depth antitrust investigation into the proposed transaction.
Liberty Global agreed to acquire Base in April and merge it with its local unit Telenet, which is a cableco that also offers mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) services via its King & Kong tariff plans.
By the end of June, Telenet served 953,700 mobile customers, compared to Base’s 3.2 million.
All eyes will be on EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who recently defended the watchdog’s approach to telco M&As after TeliaSonera and Telenor Denmark abandoned their plan to combine their Danish operations into a 50:50 joint venture in the face of stiff regulatory opposition.
"Every case has to be assessed on its own facts and merits," she said in a statement. In the case of TeliaSonera and Telenor, "what the parties offered was not su fficient to avoid harm to competition."
Analysts from Standard and Poor’s noted last week that the Danish decision could have implications for a number of ongoing deals in Europe, Telenet and Base included.
When it comes to in-market consolidation in Europe, the Commission typically takes issues when a proposed deal, if approved, reduces the number of competing network operators.
In a number of instances, remedies have been applied to M&As in order to preserve the number of players in the market. Usually this involves selling spectrum or offering wholesale network access on favourable terms.
In the case of Telenet and Base, a large cableco with a relatively small MVNO operation has agreed to acquire a large mobile operator. It will be interesting to see whether Vestager will seek to maintain the same number of players in the Belgian market.
