The recently created joint venture between the UK arms of T-Mobile and Orange has come up with a new corporate identity, 'Everything, Everywhere'. This may sound more like an advertising slogan than a company name, but in fact, for marketing purposes, the firm will hold on to its existing brands, at least for now, positioning Orange as the premium offering and TMo as the “challenger brand”.
The two components will retain their own stores, marketing campaigns, consumer propositions and service centers, giving the JV the UK's largest retail presence with over 700 stores nationwide .
New CEO Tom Alexander said in his speech to introduce the new name: “We are Everything Everywhere - it's our name, our vision, and our ambition - and we run two of the UK's biggest brands, Orange and T-Mobile .”
The retention of two identities is in line with carrier moves round the world to support multiple brands in order to target different customer groups more accurately - Sprint recently announced a similar plan in the wake of its acquisition of Virgin Mobile, creating four prepaid brands for different user profiles.
The UK leader may still have multiple logos, but it is aiming for harmonization behind the scenes and plans to create a single super-network once it is officially integrated on July 1. Full roaming will be in place this year, and there will be consolidation of overlapping infrastructure, while new 3G expansion and future LTE migration will be undertaken in common, and possibly with new suppliers.
Alexander said, referring to the mobile data boom: “That is why, through our scale and Britain's only super-network with its unsurpassed coverage and capacity, we will be leading this revolution, giving customers instant access to everything, everywhere.”
The new body has about 37% market share in the ultra-competitive UK, with over 30 million customers, ahead of O2 on 28%, Vodafone on 23% and the small 3 UK. The merged business will have pro forma revenues of about £7.7 billion (€8.96 billion) and EBITDA of £1.7 billion. Net capex and opex savings are expected to be about £3.5 billion in total.
Dario Talmesio, senior analyst at Informa, commented: “Most of the convergence and synergies in the first place seem to focus on creating a single super-network and a unified management team . We see this as a positive move, as any customer facing change would be gradual; their main focus is on getting one network in the short term (up to 2012) while they figure out what the overall strategy is in the long term (not just on mobile, but as a converged operator).”
This article originally appeared on Rethink Wireless