ABOVE: Black+White's Johnathan Eele during a 2009 publicity stunt "mourning" the death of Telecom's $10 txt deal as the telco attempted to move up the food chain with XT (a $12 txt plan has since re-materialised).
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ABOVE: Black+White's Johnathan Eele during a 2009 publicity stunt "mourning" the death of Telecom's $10 txt deal as the telco attempted to move up the food chain with XT (a $12 txt plan has since re-materialised).
In an ASX announcement, Australia’s M2 (ASX: MTU) said its fully-owned New Zealand subsidiary, M2 NZ), has bought Black+White.
Black+White is a so-called MVNO or mobile virtual network operator, which sells its own plans that are, essentially, a rebadged version of Vodafone’s 3G service.
MVNOs can offer their own plans, and handsets.
M2 and Black+White already share backoffice operations in New Zealand.
The combined operation has a turnover of $5 million.
Black+White chief executive Jonathan Eele – a former Telecom NZ executive and veteran of Hutchison’s 3 – will run the merged company.
The purchase of the Black + White assets by M2 is to be completed via an issue of additional shares in M2 NZ to Black+White shareholders (essentially, Mr Eele). Following the issue, M2NZ will be 70% owned by M2 and 30% owned by Mr Eele.
The company will continue with both the M2 and Black+White brands. M2 is focused on the business market while B+W, whose launch was targeted at consumers, now focuses on the small to medium business market, Mr Eele recently told NBR.
M2NZ also announced today that it has appointed Troy Elliott as its sales director, with the mandate of expanding M2NZ’s customer base and sales channel reach across New Zealand.
In a recent NBR survey of the MVNO market (which includes the mobile operations of Orcon, CallPlus, TelstraClear and others), Black+White refused to give any customer numbers, but did claim around 60 staff.
Of other small MVNOs, Compass said it had 5000 mobile customers; Digital Island 1000.
The largest MVNO is TelstraClear, which has around 30,000 mobile customers living the virtual loca. Most are now now migrated from Telecom CDMA to Vodafone’s 3G network following a Telecom-TelstraClear falling out over access to XT.
