T-Mobile acquired by two investors for €5.1 billion

Telecom company T-Mobile Nederland was sold for 5.1 billion euros to two investors. The private equity firm Apax Partners and the American growth investor Warburg Pincus were jointly involved in the purchase. They're getting not only the 75 percent that Deutsche Telekom owned, but also the remaining stake of Swedish Tele2 in T-Mobile Nederland.

Deutche Telekom announced in May that it was looking at the options for the Dutch subsidiary. Due to a merger with the Dutch branch of Tele2 a few years ago, T-Mobile grew into a formidable competitor for KPN and VodafoneZiggo, until then by far the two largest parties in the telecom market. Besides the brands T-Mobile and Tele2, Ben and Simpel also belong to T-Mobile Nederland.

T-Mobile announced that nothing will change in its strategy on the Dutch market. The collaboration with Open Fiber for the construction of fiber optic networks is also unaffected. Apax and Warburg Pincus also indicated that they see a lot of growth potential in the company and want to focus on further innovation.

Deutsche Telekom has been active in the Dutch telecom market for 21 years. At first this happened as a partner in Ben, but in 2003 the Germans became the sole owner and renamed the company to T-Mobile. A few years later industry partner Orange was bought. Tele2 followed in 2019 and Simpel was taken over a year later.

Deutsche Telekom will use a portion of the proceeds from this sale to increase its stake in US telecom provider T-Mobile US.