The Spanish Securities Commission, or CNMV, has given the green light to Orange’s planned takeover of Jazztel.
The French telco will pay €3.4 billion for Jazztel if all shareholders take it up on its €13-per-share voluntary cash offer that will open on Thursday and run until 24 June.
The OK from the CNMV comes a week after the European Commission gave the go-ahead, subject to certain conditions designed to protect competition in Spain, where there is some overlap between the telcos’ operations.
The conditions will facilitate the entry of a new player into the market, European competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said.
Orange has agreed to divest a fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network covering 700,000-800,000 premises in major cities. The buyer will be granted wholesale access to Jazztel’s ADSL network for up to eight years for an unlimited number of subscribers, allowing it to compete for customers in 78% of Spain’s territory.
Furthermore, Orange has also committed to grant the buyer of the FTTH network wholesale access to its mobile network, including 4G, unless said buyer already has access to mobile infrastructure.
Orange is already the second largest provider of fixed broadband services in Spain with 15% of the country’s broadband connections at the end of last year, according to the latest figures from telecom regulator the Comisión Nacional de los Mercados y la Competencia (CNMC).
The merged Orange/Jazztel would have had a 27% market share, putting it closer to leader Telefonica, which claimed 45% at year-end.
In the mobile market, where Jazztel operates as an MVNO only, Orange had a 23% share of Spain’s subscribers at the same date, again putting it second behind Telefonica, whose Movistar unit claimed 32%.
