Bouygues pledges to favour French suppliers if it buys SFR

News General France 11 MRT 2014
Bouygues pledges to favour French suppliers if it buys SFR

Bouygues group chairman and CEO Martin Bouygues has written a letter to French industry minister Arnaud Montebourg in which he makes a number of commitments as part of his offer to buy mobile and broadband operator SFR from Vivendi and merge it with Bouygues Telecom. The letter seen by Le Monde reveals several new items, including a pledge to ask its call centre contractors to only use France-based employees to answer Bouygues Telecom-SFR customers’ calls, except overnight.

Alluding to the rival offer from Altice, which is listed in Amsterdam and headquartered in Luxembourg, Bouygues wrote that the combined entity will be listed in Paris and headquartered in France. Finally, he promised to favour French suppliers when technically pertinent. The company told Le Monde that Bouygues Telecom is ready to use Alcatel-Lucent for fixed networks, but not necessarily for mobiles, having bought from Huawei and Ericsson until now. It will decide on a case by case basis.

As previously announced, Bouygues promised to make no job cuts in a merged Bouygues Telecom-SFR and to invest EUR 2 billion a year in fixed and mobile networks, including EUR 400 million a year in its fibre network.

When asked about the letter on RTL radio, the minister welcomed the CEO’s pledges and said that since they were in writing it would make it easier to contest them if they are not respected.

Categories:

General

Companies:

Bouygues Telecom,  SFR,  NOKIASUS-20401-Newsfeed,  Vivendi,  Altice Europe

Countries:

France

Tags:

Production planning & operations, Data services, Unified communications, Staff, Messaging, Network equipment, Fibre, Wireline, Wireless, Internet Access, Consumer, Enterprise, M&A buyouts & divestments

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