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Australia greenlights Vodafone-Hutchison merger in the country

Categories: Three, Vodafone
By: , IntoMobile
Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 1:40 AM

Vodafone/Hutchison 3 merger in Australia

You’ve probably heard that Hutchison’s and Vodafone’s Australian operations want to merge to create a new operator called VHA, which stands for Vodafone Hutchinson Australia. Well, the government has nothing against the deal, even though they raised some concerns earlier that it could kill the competition in the market.

The new founding is that the move is unlikely to hurt competition, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). The reasoning behind this flip-flop is the “increasing need for mobile network operators to have sufficient scale to be able to continue to make significant investments in their network capabilities.” Hold on a sec – am I reading this correctly? Hutchinson and Vodafone don’t have the money to invest in infrastructure? :)

Sure, Australian market is not that large, and they need to make some money along the way, but we’re talking about two friggin’ giants here.

Anyway, now that the government doesn’t have anything against the deal, guess it’s all about the timing and operational things to complete the deal. We’ll certainly cover the official “VHA lives now” news, have no doubt about it.

About The Author

Dusan Belic

Dusan has been using smartphones since their introduction and is now following the latest trends in the industry. The "convergence" is what he's most excited about, and writing about it is the next logical thing to do. He thinks that using a smartphone is what everyone who cares about their time should do. In addition to his interests in mobile phones, Dusan also loves to experiment with the latest web and mobile 2.0 services. The idea of accessing and managing your information from any device no matter where you are simply amazes him. Whether it's an online to-do list, note taking service or a video sharing social network, he's there to try it out. He admits though, he's still searching for the ultimate web-based organizational tool, which "sings" perfectly with the mobile PIM application. Dusan used to run SymbianWatch.com which later became part of IntoMobile. He lives in Serbia, South-East Europe, from where he edits the site on a daily basis.