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A few hours ago the news broke: MásMóvil acquired Lycamobile. His name is not very well known in Spain, but the truth is that the group led by Meinrad Spenger has acquired the rights to the Spanish division of Lycamobile for the generous amount of 372 million euros. What is your purchase really due to? What is Lycamobile and what will become of it from now on? We see it.
First of all, what is Lycamobile?
Although the Lycamobile is not well known in our country, the company belongs to the largest international group of virtual operators, also known as OMV (Virtual Mobile Operator, to be more exact). It is a common telephone operator and has a presence in no less than 23 countries. Today, it has 15 million active clients around the world.
If we talk about the Spanish division, Lyca bases a large part of its catalog on international rates. This is what the company's own motto says: Call the world for less (“Call the world for less” in Spanish). It currently has 1.5 million active lines in Spain and the average ARPU (revenue per user) is 7 euros.
However, the mobile operator has national rates aimed at users with common needs, with mobile data and national calls and SMS. It also has a series of vouchers with which we can make international calls for a relatively cheap price.
From the website itself we can even know the price of a call from a certain country to another where the operator has a compatible mobile network. The network used in Spain, by the way, is that of Movistar in a large part of the territory, at least for 4G coverage. After the purchase by MásMóvil this could change, as we will explain below.
What will Lycamobile be from your purchase?
At the time of this writing, none of the companies has provided the roadmap that will be carried out this 2020 from the purchase of Lycamobile by MásMóvil. The group has assured that "they expect to have synergies of 70 million euros". It is also known that the purchase will not entail any relevant capex for the Spanish operator, so it is understood that it will not vary excessively: neither in catalog nor in availability. We can confirm this by looking at the company's acquisition history in recent years.
In 2016, MásMóvil acquired 100% of Pepephone. Later, in June of that same year, the group absorbed Yoigo completely. Later, the operator was launching and acquiring OMV companies such as Lebara and Llamaya. None of these operators have suffered an alteration in their rates to date.
As for the networks used by Lycamobile, it will foreseeably host some of the bands currently used by the group to connect to the Internet, something that could influence the availability of the 5G network for the latter. Orange and Jazztel are the two operators that supply the network of the entire group, precisely because of the purchase of assets in 2015 from both companies. Both would join the Movistar network, although it is not ruled out that MásMóvil will discard the use of the latter for economic reasons.
What will happen to Lycamobile customers from now on? For legal purposes, the contract will pass into the hands of Grupo MásMóvil, the legal name of the company behind MásMóvil. In practice, this will not lead to any variation in the conditions of the original contract, although users may terminate their relationship with Lyca without any penalty.
