O2 & Virgin Media To Merge

Mobile company O2 and broadband and TV company Virgin Media are to merge, creating one of the UK's largest entertainment and telecoms firms and, they hope, a major rival to BT.

Full article on BBC News - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52570593

Seeing as the last attempt to merge O2 and 3 was blocked, will this make it past the regulator?
Will they keep the two names or will O2 become Virgin Mobile, as Virgin is the bigger and more valuable company?

Virgin Media is the bigger company, but O2 is the bigger mobile operator, it's the cable TV business that makes Virgin Media worth more.

I can see them keeping both names. EE didn't rebrand as BT Mobile. They did recently dual-brand the shops and I can see O2/VM doing the same.

It might be interesting to see if Virgin Mobile will go through with its planned change of MVNO from EE to Vodafone as a result of this merger. I can't see there being any hurdles to this merger, as O2 doesn't have a basic Broadband/Home Phone/Pay TV service and whilst Virgin Mobile is a popular network, I don't think it's anywhere near the size O2, nor Three who they were originally going to merge with.

It;'ll be interesting to see if one of the brands gets ditched, if not both. I think it's more likely that O2 brand will be ditched given how much Liberty Global has invested in the Virgin Media brand, but only time will tell this ultimately.

Ireland will be an interesting case as both O2 and Virgin Media operate in the Republic in a similar manner to the UK, or does this merger not effect the operations in the Republic?

I agree with JAS84 that I think that they will keep the O2 name. Being the 2nd most popular mobile provider (only to EE), I don’t see why they would rename it. I’m pretty sure the Tweet said it would be a 50/50 ownership of the operations so it would be unfair on Telefónica’s part to call it Virgin Mobile.

There is a video explaining the merger on Telefónica’s Twitter, I tried uploading it but failed. If someone else could I’d appreciate it.

Also what would this mean of Disney+? (which O2 provides for free for a few months to it’s subscribers) It currently has a deal with Sky but now that O2 are joining forces with the rivals what will that mean?

The O2 mobile network was taken over by 3 a few years ago in the republic.

BREAKING NEWS‼️

Telefónica y Liberty Global fusionarán sus operaciones en Reino Unido: @VirginMedia y @O2 UK se unirán para crear operador líder fijo-móvil. #ConnectivityChampion https://t.co/SaLL3np6aB pic.twitter.com/FoUASJ6jZo

— Telefónica (@Telefonica) May 7, 2020

It seems business as usual for now, as well as the new company being a joint venture.

Virgin Mobile's UK business has over 3m subscribers.

I believe that Ireland isn't included in the deal. Presumably Virgin Media Ireland will be reorganised back to being directly owned by Liberty Global rather than being a subsidiary of Virgin Media in the UK. It will be interesting to see if the Virgin Media brand continues to be used in Ireland afterwards.

I'd expect they'd want a unified brand in the UK, whether that's VM, O2, or something new is hard to know.

What about giffgaff?

Do Virgin still do ADSL connections? I can see them ditching that and moving their openreach business entirely over to the o2 brand, keeping Virgin for cable.

They sold the consumer ADSL customers to TalkTalk a few years a go.

Well that answers that then.

So that just leaves Virgin Mobile and giffgaff as unknowns