Telefonica Germany CEO Rene Schuster believes that consolidation of Germany's mobile phone market is overdue, Bloomberg reports. Schuster believes that the market is too small for four network operators and any deal may involve a larger and smaller operating joining forces. He said that a merger would probably occur in the next 3-5 years, but insisted that Telefonica Germany was large enough to execute its strategy alone. Robin Bienenstock, analyst at Sanford C Bernstein, believes that Telefonica Germany and E-Plus, owned by KPN, are the most obvious assets for merger from an operational and industrial point of view. He estimates that a merger of these two mobile networks could generate cost savings of around EUR 4.2 billion.
