According to a report by News.at, A1 Telekom Austria plans to preserve the existing branding of its newly acquired mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) Yesss!, although all customers will be transferred from Orange’s network to its own during the summer. Press speculation was rife that Yesss! would be amalgamated with Telekom’s existing budget brand ‘bob’, but that notion has been discredited by company insiders who want to preserve the two units, each of which are targeted at different demographic bases. News.at claims that post-paid specialist bob currently has 915,000 users, of whom around 90% are contract customers, while Yesss! counts roughly 720,000 subscribers, including 650,000 pre-paid users.
As previously reported by TeleGeography’s CommsUpdate, MVNO Yesss!, as well as certain other intellectual property of Orange Austria, including its former ‘One’ brand name, was sold to A1 for EUR390 million (USD521.4 million) as part of a side deal to Orange’s recently completed EUR1.4 billion takeover by Hutchison 3G Austria (H3G), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hutchison Whampoa Limited.