Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile Austria unit is buying Liberty Global’s Austrian cable business, UPC Austria, for $2.25 billion, including debt.
The acquisition will enable the T-Mobile unit to offer more services, including broadband, where it currently only has mobile operations.
“Broadband is the indispensable foundation for a digital Austria,” said Andreas Bierwirth, CEO T-Mobile Austria, in an announcement about the planned acquisition. “It is our ambition to provide our customers, whoever and wherever they are, with the best possible seamless broadband experience for all of their needs through LTE, digital cable, fiber and future technologies like 5G.”
Liberty Global is making the deal as part of its efforts to reorganize operations in case merger talks with Vodafone pick up again, Reuters reports.
With the acquisition, T-Mobile Austria hopes to challenge the current market leader A1 Telekom Austria. Telekom Austria has about 1.5 million fixed-line broadband subscribers compared to roughly 500,000 for UPC Austria, according to Reuters.
“With this acquisition Deutsche Telekom is taking another major step to realize our strategy to become a fully converged operator in our European footprint,” Srini Gopalan, board member Deutsche Telekom for Europe, said. “The acquired cable network will be a perfect match with our best mobile network. It will allow customers to benefit from extended scope of services with fixed and mobile offerings from one source. We see a significant potential to accelerate growth in the Austrian market.”
T-Mobile Austria said it will continue investing in its LTE buildout to ensure broadband connectivity in rural areas. That combined with UPC Austria’s dense urban fiber footprint, will give T-Mobile a “strong backbone for high speed mobile broadband access for next-generation network 5G,” the operator said.
The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2018.