Telenor Agrees to Buy Vodafone Sweden for $1.24 Bln

Bloomberg reports that "Telenor ASA, Norway's state- controlled phone company, agreed to buy Vodafone Group Plc's Swedish business in a transaction valued at 1.04 billion euros ($1.24 billion)."

According to the article, "Vodafone Sweden is the third-largest mobile-phone company in Sweden, with 1.5 million subscribers and a market share of about 15 percent." Vodafone will receive about 970 million euros and record a charge of about 500 million pounds ($885 million).

John Delaney at Ovum remarked that Telenor needed to fuel growth due to intense competition and falling revenues from it traditional telco services. He said,, "One of the easy ways for Telenor to reverse that trend" is through increased roaming revenue. "People tend to travel between Norway and Sweden a lot more than they do between the U.K. and Sweden.''