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.