easyMobile bites the dust

easyMobile is no more. The short-lived MVNO has had the plug pulled by the man himself behind the “easy’ brand, Stelios Haji-Ioannou (or just plain “Stelios” as still prefers to be called even after being knighted for services to entrepreneurship).~ ~ Stelios has abruptly cancelled the brand-licencing agreement he had made with the former-state run and formerly state-owned Danish telco, TDC. The deal, that was first mooted back in the August 2004, had, in essence, allowed TDC to trade on and under the easyMobile brand name as an MVNO in Germany and the UK.~ ~ In a statement, easyGroup says the agreement has been annulled because of what has occurred within TDC since its ownership changed hands in January of this year.~ ~ At the beginning of 2006, TDC was purchased for €10 billion by a five-member consortium comprising Apax, Blackstone, KKR, Permira and Providence Equity Partners.

Before that time it had been listed on the Euronext stock exchange.~ ~ According to the easyGroup, "As is standard practice with new owners of this type, ventures outside the core market of TDC were starved of funding and the management was purged." ~ ~ The result, Stelios claims, is that TDC was not provided with enough money for the easyMobile venture to go forward in the way that had been envisioned and that, as a result, the consortium and its members have been in breach of their agreement to run the easyMobile brand and service.~ ~ In another statement Stelios says, “Simply put, TDC is no longer a worthy licensee of the easy brand and damages will be sought to compensate for any damage done." He adds that the esay brand is “at risk if it stays in the hands of TDC” and is therefore also demanding that it must hand back the easyMobile name within one month.~ ~ The initial agreement between EasyGroup and TDC called for the establishment of 12 MVNO operations across the length and breadth of Europe and the plan was for easyMobile to carve out a 10 per cent share of the massively competitive and over-populated European mobile sector.~ ~ In the event only three services were launched, in the Netherlands as well as the UK and Germany and none of the three managed to achive even one per cent of market share. The Dutch incarnation of easyMobile quietly closed in July when TDC stopped investing in it.~ ~ The easyMobile service suffered because when it was first introduced all contact with the company, including buying the necessary SIM card, had to be done over the Internet and then later the virtual operator had trouble when subscribers found that they could not always make top-up credits over the web with plastic debit or credit cards.~ ~ In an effort to boost sales, easyMobile did a deal with High Street retail outlet “The Link” and even went so far as to sell as limited range of its own handsets but subscriber numbers never rose above 33,000.~ ~ EasyGroup says the responsibility for moving subscribers to a new mobile services provider is firmly with TDC and has effectively washed its hands of the company.~ ~ A terse new statement reads, “TDC are contractually obliged to organise an orderly transfer of customers to another provider and to look after their staff and suppliers who were working on the easyMobile project”.~ ~ As you might expect, Stelios, ever the optimist, says the esayGroup will be back with another mobile offer “very soon”. He won’t say if it will be another MVNO.~