Simple takeover by T-Mobile final: no change for customers
T-Mobile may take over Simpel. The budget provider will fall under T-Mobile from December, but little will change for customers and employees.
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Approval: Takeover of Simple by T-Mobile may proceed
The Authority for Consumers & Markets (ACM) has given T-Mobile approval to acquire Simpel. The takeover was already announced last October, but the regulator still had to give approval before the glasses could be settled. “The acquisition will not have a significant impact on competition in the market for mobile telecommunications services,” said ACM.
Simpel will continue to operate as an independent brand and will be officially incorporated by T-Mobile from December. Nothing will change for the approximately one million customers and twenty employees. All existing Simpel subscriptions will continue to run and you can therefore ‘just’ purchase new products from December.
It is not the first time that Simpel has been part of T-Mobile. From 2010 to 2014, the price fighter was also part of the originally German telecom company. Now that Simpel is once again part of T-Mobile, the provider has approximately 6.6 million customers in the Netherlands.
For Simpel, Tele2 was T-Mobile’s most recent purchase. It took the regulator almost a year to approve the takeover. This was because the number of providers with their own telecom network in the Netherlands then went from four to three. Simpel is a so-called virtual provider and has therefore never had its own network: they used the T-Mobile system for that.
Future of Simple
T-Mobile has not made any statements about the future of Simpel. It is therefore to be expected that the provider will continue to focus on the ‘bottom’ of the telecom market.
Simpel sells relatively affordable SIM only subscriptions to private individuals and business providers. You cannot go to Simpel for a device with a subscription: you have to be and stay with T-Mobile for that. Also new techniques, such as 5G, are often not directly available from low-cost carriers such as Simple.
