Acquisition of SFR: transferring 25 million customers to Orange, Free and Bouygues would take a lot of time

Recovering SFR under its wing is not child’s play for Orange, Free and Bouygues Telecom, with already a first bundled offer of 17 billion euros rejected immediately by Alticeowner of the operator. Even if an agreement were reached, the time to migrate the just over 25 million customers would be a real headache. A process that would take years.

Olivier Roussat, CEO of Bouygues Telecompromoted transparency around the takeover of SFR, and more precisely the timetable which would follow the sale of the historic operator led by Patrick Drahi.

Speaking to Le Figaro, he begins by already emphasizing that it would take two years for the Competition Authority and the Electronic Communications Regulatory Authority (Arcep) to validate the takeover, a time necessary to obtain all the authorizations.

But that’s not all, a period of 30 months would be added to migrate all customers from SFR to the operator(s) who acquired it. We are talking here about 19.3 million mobile subscribers and 6.1 million having subscribed to an Internet offer, for a total of almost 25.4 million French people.

So even if the takeover was finalized in the coming weeks, we would have to wait four and a half years for Free, Orange and Bouygues Telecom to see the benefits by recovering SFR’s colossal customer base, which would take us to mid-2030, or even 2031.

It remains to be seen how things will evolve within the framework of the negotiations, where the first offer of 17 billion euros — just below the average market valuation — was far from that of creditors, set at 28 billion euros.

Suffice to say that the recomposition of the French telecom landscape will not happen before the next decade.