Marta Munoz Mendez-Villamil
BT - Spanish Fusion
BT Spain has launched an MVNO operation targeted at enterprise customers. The operator will be using Vodafone's network and is expecting to achieve 60,000 customers (or 5-10% of total revenues) within its first year in operation.Comment: The enterprise segment has been about the only one that remained untouched by the tens of MVNOs that have proliferated in the Spanish market in recent years. BT's plan is to target the customers it already has (it provides voice and data services to enterprise customers as well as a whole other range of value-added services) in order to achieve a target of 60,000 customers after one year of operations (that will be summer 2009). The operator announced that it will be using its Fusion solution to offer convergent services. This comes at a time when its Fusion service is under fire in the UK for failing to attract enough customers. Arguably, and as we mentioned in our EuroView Daily comment yesterday, this failure has mainly been related to the consumer segment, so it still has a chance of making Fusion succeed in Spain.Although we welcome BT's move - its fusion solution has a lot to offer for enterprise customers and Spanish workers might benefit from it - we still have a major concern over its ambitious plans.The Spanish market is heavily saturated and BT will be taking a brave step in competing with strong MNOs such as Telefonica, Vodafone and France Telecom. While, arguably, none of the existing MVNOs offer services to the enterprise, BT will still face stiff competition from companies like Telefonica and Vodafone - both of which have a major presence in that segment. As a comparison, TeliaSonera's MVNO, Yoigo, had 15,000 customers after one year in operation_ and that was targeting the consumer segment with dramatically low tariffs!
