Carphone Warehouse buys OneTel and Tele2 to compete against BT

19 December 2005 11:01 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Carphone Warehouse has announced it has bought both telecoms companies OneTel and Tele2 in a pre-Christmas spending spree of £140m to allow it to effectively complete head on with BT.

“Our goal is to become the number one alternative residential telecoms provider in the UK market”, the company said in a statement on its website.

It has bought alternative fixed line telecom provider OneTel for £132m ($233m) - picking up 1.1m customers - from British Gas owner Centrica.

With the promise to pay Centrica up to a further £22.2m over the next 3 years if higher British Gas customer recruitment targets are met.

Meanwhile the company has also acquired Tele2 for £8.5m - picking up a further 188,000 customers in the UK and 36,000 customers in the Republic of Ireland.

“We intend to rebrand OneTel's operations as TalkTalk and to give all of OneTel's residential customers the benefit of free on-network calls as quickly as possible”. The statement continued, “In tandem with the acquisition of Tele2's UK business, also announced today, we will then have a base of approximately 2.4m TalkTalk customers all calling each other for free”.

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