Billing Services Gro EU clears Syniverse buy of BSG wireless unit
BRUSSELS (Thomson Financial) - The European Commission said it has cleared Syniverse Holdings Inc's proposed acquisition of Billing Services Group Ltd's (BSG) wireless business. The commission said its in-depth investigation, opened in July, has shown the acquisition would be unlikely to result in competition concerns in the market for the provision of GSM roaming data clearing services. The commission said it has therefore concluded the proposed transaction would not significantly impede effective competition in the European Economic Area (EEA) or a significant part of it. It said, with the proposed transaction, the number of competitors currently active in Europe in the market for clearing services for roaming data would be reduced from three to two. But it added its in-depth investigation revealed Syniverse has not exerted strong competitive pressure on BSG's prices and switching between BSG and Syniverse (or vice-versa) has been very rare, but both companies have faced strong competition from market leader Mach. It is therefore likely the combined Syniverse/BSG would be in strong competition with Mach in the future, the commission said. Furthermore, it said other data clearing companies, not yet active in Europe, would have the possibility to provide such services to European mobile network operators (MNOs) as there are no capacity constraints and several MNOs clearly consider them to be credible bidders, such as US company VeriSign. In addition, forthcoming technological developments may give other players, in particular providers of software for the billing of roaming services, the ability and incentive to enter the market for data clearing services, it said. The Commission added its market investigation has also shown MNOs would remain sufficiently strong to exclude the likelihood of unilateral price increases by the merged entity, in particular by sponsoring the entry of new competitors. The in-depth market investigation also confirmed the reduction of the number of currently active data clearing service providers operating in Europe would be unlikely to result in the co-ordination of competitive behaviour between the remaining service providers. phil.mccomish@thomson.com pam/ms1
|