EU reportedly set to approve TIM/Vodafone tower JV

After announcing their intention to merge their tower businesses last July, TIM and Vodafone have had to wait nine months for the EU to give it a look.

While there had been no formal announcement at time of writing, Reuters spoke to some people who reckon the European  Commission is about to green-light the move. The mergers of the telecoms tower businesses of the two operators would apparently create Europe’s biggest mobile tower company, so antitrust authorities were bound to take an interest.

Presumably the activities of competing tower giants such as Cellnex reassured the EC that even such a major bit of M&A wouldn’t damage competition. Furthermore the whole European tower scene seems to be stampeding towards consolidation, so this presumably won’t be the last such case it has to scrutinise.

The combined tower holdings will be run by INWIT, the tower company TIM is currently the 60% owner of. After the €10 billion merger TIM and Vodafone will each own a 37.5% stake in INWIT, with equal governance rights.

Antitrust authorities will presumably only start thinking about blocking this sort of M&A when it gives one company to great a share of the mobile towers in a single country. TIM is not international, but Vodafone is an MNO in the Italian market. The report says they offered to give rival, presumably Italian, operators access to their towers as a condition for the deal being approved.