Telefonica Deutschland has the outline of an agreement to sell Yourfone, a mobile brand held by its recent purchase E-Plus, to German MVNO Drillisch.
The companies have signed a non-binding letter of intent allowing Drillisch – which operates on…
Telefonica Deutschland has the outline of an agreement to sell Yourfone, a mobile brand held by its recent purchase E-Plus, to German MVNO Drillisch.
The companies have signed a non-binding letter of intent allowing Drillisch – which operates on Telefonica’s network – to buy Yourfone for a price in the range of €50m to €100m in January, providing the two parties can finalise the details.
The potential Yourfone sale is separate to the remedies Telefonica and E-Plus agreed with regulators to get their four-to-three merger over the line.
Drillisch approached Telefonica about purchasing the brand during discussions about its MVNO arrangement, which was part of the remedies, a Telefonica spokesperson said.
Yourfone has roughly 235,000 subscribers, which are predominantly post-paid. It constitutes a small fraction of Telefonica and E-Plus’s combined customer footprint of 41 million, and Telefonica has said it does not plan to sell any more customers.
The Spanish incumbent plans to continue with the multi-brand strategy which both it and E-Plus have been pursuing to address different customer segments.
Telefonica completed its takeover of rival mobile operator E-Plus at the start of October for €8.6bn.
In the summer, Telefonica agreed to give Drillisch access to 20% of its mobile network capacity over a five-year period and the option to acquire rights to use a further 10% of its capacity, in order to secure the European Commission’s blessing for the deal.
Subsequently, it has agreed to sell a number of its stores to Drillisch, which has outlined plans to add three and a half million LTE customers between 2015 and 2019. It currently has two million subscribers, according to data from Berenberg.
