Vodafone stumps up £405m in latest acquisition

NEWS Coming hot on the heels of Vodafone's £155m acquisition of Project Telecom last week, the mobile operator will now fork out another £405m for Singlepoint. Vodafone's previous CEO, Christopher Gent, mentioned the telco was interested in buying Singlepoint back in July and the company has now concluded the deal, which is thought to be an attempt by the group to bolster its consumer rather than business customers. Singlepoint is owned by the Caudwell Group, which also owns the high street mobile retail chain Phones4U, and provides billing and customer care services to 1.9 million customers in the UK, 1.5 million of whom are Vodafone users. The Singlepoint deal will allow Vodafone to squeeze a substantial amount of extra revenue out of existing customers because mobile phone middlemen, such as Singlepoint, bulk buy airtime to resell and usually skim off around a quarter of a user's bill. Gavin Darby, CEO of Vodafone UK, said in a statement: "Together with the proposed acquisition of Project Telecom, this transaction will increase the direct access to our contract customer base in the UK to 90 per cent. This will give us greater flexibility to develop customer usage of both voice and data services and to offer a consistency of service and products to an even larger section of our customer base.” The deal is subject to EU merger clearance, expected later this year.