Although it seems that the telecommunications market is hibernating until the mega-merger between Orange and MásMóvil is activated, in the background an operator continues to grow almost silently, taking place between last 2022 and as little as 2023 with 130 acquisitions of OMV virtual operators .
This is Avatel, which has very promising expansion plans and which continues its dispute with Digi for being the fifth national operator, each with its own weapons.
Avatel starts the year by buying OMVs
After closing a total of 122 acquisitions during the past 2022, with a growth plan with which it intends to keep the place of the fifth operator, with which it bids with Digi, now in this first month it closes another eight acquisitions for a value of something more of 20 million euros.
As reported by Cinco Días, it is a purchase of local operators to strengthen their presence in growing areas such as Levante, Andalusia (especially Almería) and Castilla-La Mancha (mainly in Albacete).
This operator has already reached 130 OMV purchases in this way, which further unifies a market as segmented as this one. Last year, it reached an agreement with an investment fund of French origin called Antin Infrastructure Partners for the purchase of 100% of Lyntia Access, one of the reference neutral operators in the wholesale telecommunications market in Spain, for around 1,000 million euros, so it cannot be ruled out that we have only witnessed the tip of the iceberg of what Avatel may become in the future.
In fact, Avatel is one of the main candidates for the purchase of the assets that the European Commission can force Orange and MásMóvil to sell to authorize their merger.
Fiber and TV expansion plans
Not only must we take into account Avatel’s expansion plans in the mobile telephony segment, but we must also be attentive to what may happen in the fiber segment.
Avatel has been the main winner in the second call for the UNICO-Broadband Program, which aims to deploy fiber in rural areas. Avatel has been the company that has won the concession in a total of 14 provinces, in addition to the 6 that it won the previous year.
In this way, Avatel will be the telecommunications company in charge of connecting 199,074 homes and companies to fiber, almost 28% of the total, in Albacete, Cádiz, Castellón, Córdoba, Cuenca, Guadalajara, Huelva, Málaga, Ourense, Palencia, Pontevedra, Soria , Teruel and Zaragoza.
Nor does he lose face to television, another of the pillars of the operators. In this case, it has been commissioned to close agreements with third parties. For example, with DAZN to integrate the sports content television platform app into its grid. It also closed another agreement to include the CLICtv application, which includes more than 90 television channels, on Samsung televisions.