easyMobile closes down Operations
14 November 2006 by axxxr easyMobile is to close its service in the UK and Germany on 13 December, easyMobile’s 80,000 customers were informed of the decision by text message.
The easyGroup has today terminated its brand licence agreement with TDC, the operators of easyMobile in UK and Germany. TDC, originally the state owned telecoms company of Denmark, was a listed company on the Copenhagen stock exchange when it was licensed to operate the easyMobile brand by the easyGroup in the spring of 2005. The easyGroup took no financial risk in this licensing agreement and easyMobile has been a profitable brand for the easyGroup since launch, collecting six figure royalty streams from TDC for the use of the 'easy' brand. However, in January 2006 TDC was purchased by a consortium of private equity houses including KKR, Perima, Providence Equity Partners, Blackstone and Apax. This was Europe's first 10 billion euro private equity deal and, as is standard practice with new owners of this type, ventures outside the core market of TDC (ie outside Denmark) were starved of funding and the management was purged. Despite lengthy negotiations between TDC and the easyGroup to find a way to continue the easyMobile service, the easyGroup has decided that its brand is at risk if it stays in the hands of TDC and therefore today it has terminated its brand license of the easyMobile name to TDC for breaching the terms of the brand licence agreement. "Simply put, TDC is no longer a worthy licensee of the easy brand and damages will be sought to compensate for any damage done to the brand in the past or in the future," said Stelios the easyGroup chairman and founder of easyMobile. "I will make sure that TDC understand that they must treat the customers and the staff well and I am already putting a new service in place with a new partner under the easyTelecom.com brand." Under the terms of the brand license TDC are contractually obliged to relinquish use of the name easyMobile within one month , to organise an orderly transfer of the customers to another provider and to look after their staff and suppliers who were working on the easyMobile project. The easyGroup will be regaining control of the easyMobile brand in due course and will be seeking new partners to commercialise it in the mobile telephony sector. www.easymobile.com
Comments On 15 Nov 04:07 simbob wrote good! i owe them £6 odd in 'fees' they are absolute crap. they reckon charge you 75p per month if you dont spend more then £5 or £10! so ive racked up to 6 quid odd over a few months. i hate them. Lol @ me not paying them. On 14 Nov 22:32 awave wrote I don't think an 'easyMobile' will ever really work. This is as there are already so many options available to people. At current people trust their supermarket, phone shop (car phone warehouse) and the big service providers to supply their mobile phone etc.. I'm not sure that this is going to change anywhere near in the future, although if easyMobile joined with hutch. 3 then we might see some good deals. What I do think would be a good idea though, is lowering the cost of using a mobile phone right across the board. For example: it DOES NOT cost the service provider around 10p to let you send a text message. I know that people say 'well theirs t-mobile's text tariff for 3p a text' and 'tesco value mobile has 5p a text' so what...the cost of everything else is highered on such tariffs to make up the money, or the provider decides to cut certain features out of the deal (e.g. gprs) to cut down on priceage. I think that cutting down on features is a good way, but it would be much better if the companies could let us have cheap mobiles right across for everything. |
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