Brazil allows TIM to absorb Porto Seguro's MVNO

Brazilian antitrust regulator Cade approved without caveats the transfer of assets of Porto Seguro Conecta, Brazil's first and largest MVNO, to telecom operator TIM.

The insurance group decided to shut down the MVNO and transfer the base of clients to TIM, whose mobile network it was using, in order to focus on its core services.

According to the notice published Monday in the federal gazette, Cade concluded that there is no need to adopt specific competitive measures because the combination of the services will not significantly affect the mobile telephony and the machine-to-machine (M2M) markets.

The MVNO had less than 0.4% of the market with 735,018 mobile accesses at the end of August, according to telecom regulator Anatel. Of that, nearly 600,000 were M2M connections and only 115,001 were voice and data (3G and 4G) clients.

TIM holds 11.1% of the Brazilian M2M market, a share that will increase to 13.9% with the Conecta subscribers.

In mobile telephony, the migration of Conecta's clients would leave TIM with a share slightly above 24%.

However, Cade emphasized that Conecta customers' migration will depend on users' consent.

"It should be emphasized that customers can refuse to migrate, opting for other alternatives to hire a mobile telephony provider at no additional cost," according to an Anatel resolution, Cade said.