BT to Buy EE For £12.5 Billion

British Telecom is to buy mobile network Everything Everywhere (EE) for £12.5 Billion ($19 Billion). This unprecedented deal makes BT, an already giant organisation (owning much of the UK’s landline infrastructure), even bigger with the largest UK mobile network in the fold.

EE was formed as a partnership between Orange and Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile) in 2010. It currently has 31 million customers and the largest 4G customer base in Europe. This new deal will make BT exceptionally large – BT is already one of the world’s largest telecom companies, a company that consists of most of the assets that belonged to the UK’s state telecoms network before privatisation under Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s. Deutsche Telekom will still have a part to play however – they will hold 12% of the new company, with a seat on the board.

It will certainly be interesting to see how this plays out – whether EE will be rebranded as part of BT, or whether it will stay as a separate entity is something we don’t yet know.

Source: The Verge