Everything Everywhere – T Mobile And Orange’s UK Experiment

Everything Everywhere Formed In July 2010

Back in September 2009 we published a piece about the intended merger of UK parts of Deutsche Telekom (T Mobile) and France Telecom (Orange). The deal went ahead, with the new company – Everything Everywhere – starting out in June 2010.

Initially the company claimed to have 16,500 employees. Its Chief Executive Tom Alexander claimed at the time to be the UK’s biggest telecommunications company with a ‘customer base of over 30 million people and 700 retail stores across the country’. Apart from the election of key directors the company claimed there would be ‘no other role or structural changes’, which is good if it’s avoided the large-scale job losses we were predicting.
Orange customers have heard very little of Everything Everywhere, although last week they received an SMS message about the addition of T Mobile wireless connectivity. Presumably an Orange extension has also been made by T Mobile.
Figure 1 shows our assessment of the UK Telecom Services market by quarter. In particular it shows the ‘what if’, combining the revenues of both contributors historically.

Everything Everywhere Is Not The UK’s Largest Communications Company

The data shows that Everything Everywhere lags behind BT and Vodafone in terms of UK revenues and is around the same size as O2 (Telefonica’s mobile division). As always with mergers there has been the inevitable ‘settling’ of the combined revenues, for instance it now claims 28 million customers on its Web site. Mergers in our experience always mean that ‘one and one equal less than two’.

Some Conclusions – The UK Government Found An Unusal Way Of Supporting Indigenous Suppliers

Since it’s now possible to be a customer of five companies simultaneously through a single purchase, balancing the associated brands is going to be a major task.
It will be interesting to see whether the two parents extend the experiment to other countries. We do not expect it to do so in either Germany or France of course.
Our criticism of the UK government remains, in that it encourages companies to restructure here (i.e. savagely cut staffing levels in a recession). However it has demonstrated its support for British companies by cutting Vodafone’s tax bill by £6 billion according to Private Eye , so we’ve changed our views on that.
Please let us know what experiences you have as a customer or employee.