Updated Wednesday, April 3, 2024-13:09

  • Companies Orange and MásMóvil close their merger and create the telephone leader in Spain with 37 million lines

The union of Orange and MásMóvil already has a name:

MasOrange

, a simple arrangement that combines the two brands for the new leader by customers in the Spanish market. The new company has begun its journey with a presentation to the press in which

they have promised to invest 4,000 million euros in three years

and in which they have gained muscle with the figures resulting from the union between the second and fourth operators in the market.

The company has more than 40% of the country's mobile and broadband lines, but, in the words of Meinrad Spenger, the man in charge and former CEO of MásMóvil, the objective is to increase its weight in the market: "

We are the number one with distance

, but we want to expand it," said the manager of the new company, whose new logo is composed of an orange '+' and a black o, symbolizing the two original brands.

The merger has been carried out 50/50 between the shareholders of MásMóvil and Orange, although a mega-dividend has been distributed to compensate for the higher value of the French company and assume the high debt that MásMóvil was carrying.

In his press conference, Spenger underlined the "complicity" between the two halves of the new company. "There is no longer a yellow side or an orange side. We don't need egos or politicking," he said. In addition, he also gave a nod to the workforce in order to maintain the level of employment.

"We can generate employment, this is a sensitive issue. I am going to be very specific and concrete:

we do not have any forced personnel exit plan

," he stressed, although he did leave the door open to processes of voluntary departures or incentive dismissals.

Despite the investment commitments, Spenger issued a warning about the state of the market: "You can only invest if we earn money and that was not happening in the Spanish market."

THE NEW COMPANY

The company will have

8,500 direct employees

and more than 1,500 exclusive points of sale. With a turnover of 7,400 million euros in revenue and 2,650 million euros in gross profit (Ebitda), the group is still far from the 12,654 million euros billed by Telefónica in Spain during 2023.

To close this gap, the company hopes

to boost profitability

thanks to industrial synergies, which will generate savings of around 500 million euros from the fourth year onwards.

In addition, it will keep the dozen MásMóvil brands on the market, which will join the three from Orange (Orange, Jazztel and Simyo). Thus, the regional brands of Euskaltel and Guuk (Basque Country), Telecable (Asturias), R (Galicia) and Embou (Aragón) will remain active, as will Yoigo, MásMóvil, Pepehone, Lyca, Lebara and Llamaya.

At an operational level, Spenger has identified two growth focuses: the business of companies and Public Administrations and the field of new services (alarms, energy, telemedicine...).

Furthermore, another priority will be to reduce the debt of 12,500 million euros that the group carries and which the company wants to reduce "as soon as possible" to 3.5 times Ebitda, which would mean a reduction of more than 3,000 million euros with the current levels.