Spain’s Telefónica has formally completed the purchase of a 56 per cent stake in pay-TV platform Canal Plus following clearance from competition authority CNMC two weeks previously.

Telefónica will ultimately pay €707 million for the stakes, out of which €565.4 million has already been paid to Canal Plus. The telco now controls 100 per cent of the company with over 3.5 million subscribers, 70 per cent of the market.

Canal Plus’s integration into Telefónica is already under way with Movistar TV shortly launching a revamped TV offer. Telefónica is also launching later this week a new convergent offer tripling the Internet broadband speed, from 100 Mpbs to 300 Mpbs in an attempt to take the lead in the increasingly competitive broadband market, and widen its capacity to distribute Movistar TV and new added-value video services.

The company will also migrate free of charge its ADSL clients to the FTTH network which already reaches 10.3 million homes, with plans to add 3.6 million households this year.

Telefónica’s customers will enjoy download speeds of up to 300 Mpbs and upload speeds of up to 30 Mbps from the current 10 Mpbs. With this move, Telefónica will be the only company to offer the highest available Internet speed in the residential market as its competitors -Vodafone-ONO, Jazztel and Orange- only have broadband offers of up to 200 Mpbs.

..

Categories: Articles, Business, M&A