Meteor Valued by Biddy at ~ €230M

spongebob

The Sunday Times yesterday reported that The Eircom ESOT had set aside €70m which will be their 30% of the cost of buying Meteor and thereby valuing Meteor at up to €230M or so.

There have been some interesting rumours about in the trade and some interesting factoids as well.

1. Denis O'Brien has his beady little eyes on Meteor as well ...another bidding war may ensue. He may not lead the consortium this time as he did for the Eircom purchase attempt.

2. The Communications Workers Union has no intention of forcing Eircom to extend the same terms and conditions of employment, currently enjoyed by their members in Eircom, to Meteor staff. Meteor staff are to be denied shares in the ESOT and will be used as a yellowpack call centre for the 3G MVNO that Eirocm proposes to run on the Hutchison 3 Network....also from next year.

3. Eircom will conduct future recruitment through Meteor and not through Eircom itself. I personally think that the Congress of Trade Unions should investigate the CWU for tolerating this....and then kick them out.

4. By the end of 2004, the majority of the ESOT members will no longer be working in Eircom. The ESOT has over 12,000 members , of whom more than 6,000 will have taken redundancy or early retirement by end 2004. Therefore the effective lever of control of the largest Telecommunications company in Ireland will have passed to people who no longer work in the Telecommunications industry at all.

What a bad joke this all turned out to be.

M

yellum

What a coup in my opinion

JTMan

Interesting post Muck.

A little more from ENN ( http://www.enn.ie/frontpage/news-9369862.html )

The paper [Sunday Times] also reports that Eircom's ESOP (employee share ownership plan) has agreed to set aside EUR70 million to cover a possible buyout of Meteor, Ireland's third mobile operator. ESOP, which has 14,000 members, has earmarked the cash from the EUR228 million it will receive following the EUR2.4 billion refinancing of Eircom's debt. Eircom has appointed McKinsey management consultants to make recommendations on how it can become a key player in the mobile phone market by next May.

I wonder how accurate the ST article is as the consultants have just been employed.

Meteor staff are to be denied shares in the ESOT and will be used as a yellowpack call centre for the 3G MVNO that Eirocm proposes to run on the Hutchison 3 Network....

Exactly how do Eircom plan to run a MVO with 3 and Meteor at the same time? One would assume that Eircom plans to use Meteor as a roaming network for 2G coverage for the areas that the East built 3 network will not cover?

Interesting times ahead for the non-duopoly Irish mobile players.

jd

Originally posted by Muck
2. The Communications Workers Union has no intention of forcing Eircom to extend the same terms and conditions of employment, currently enjoyed by their members in Eircom, to Meteor staff. Meteor staff are to be denied shares in the ESOT and will be used as a yellowpack call centre for the 3G MVNO that Eirocm proposes to run on the Hutchison 3 Network....also from next year.

M

AFAIK, new staff in Eircom are given at most 3 year renewable personal contracts-nothing like the terms and conditions of employment of the older staff. The Esot share thing fifnishes off in November-I think you have to be an employee of Eircom for a year to be eligible, so anyone who joined eircom after last november doesnt get any shares in the esop-so that thing about meteor staff and esot is hardly an issue..

jd

Originally posted by Muck
4. By the end of 2004, the majority of the ESOT members will no longer be working in Eircom. The ESOT has over 12,000 members , of whom more than 6,000 will have taken redundancy or early retirement by end 2004. Therefore the effective lever of control of the largest Telecommunications company in Ireland will have passed to people who no longer work in the Telecommunications industry at all.

Interesting, someone said to me that once the esop share allocations fisnish in November, larger numbers of staff may be willing to lookat the redundancy packages..