Virgin Media O2 UK Moves to Cancel Vodafone Mobile Deal UPDATE

A new newspaper report today states that Virgin Media (VMO2) has moved to cancel their 5-year Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) agreement with Vodafone UK, which was signed prior to the £31bn merger with O2 and replaced a prior MVNO deal with EE (BT).

Just to recap. At the end of 2019 Virgin Media signed a 5-year deal with Vodafone to run their MVNO platform, which effectively ended their long-running supplier deal with EE (here). Under the plan, Virgin Mobile’s services – back then reflecting c.3 million customers – would start to transition to Vodafone’s platform from the end of 2021, although some 5G (mobile broadband) services were introduced before that.

However, the MVNO deal was later cast into a cloud of uncertainty after the announcement of Virgin Media UK (Liberty Global) and O2’s (Telefonica UK) plan to merge, which came only a few months after the Vodafone deal had been agreed – the £31bn merger itself finally completed in mid-2021 (here).

Despite this, the newly merged VMO2 later confirmed that the agreement with Vodafone would continue – possibly because it would have been quite costly and complex to scrap it so late into the transition, which effectively made for a longer transition before the company could harness the full benefits of their merger with O2 (i.e. closer convergence).

Suffice to say, we initially weren’t expecting any major changes, but that began to change after VMO2 launch a new range of “VOLT” products last October 2021 that aimed to replace their existing “Oomph” bundles (here). In short, this meant that customers were able to buy Virgin Media and O2 products together, for the first time, and take advantage of new benefits.

At the time we remarked that the VOLT products, while a clever way to circumvent the MVNO issue (i.e. it’s merely a mix of O2 and Virgin Media products rather than full convergence), “could cause some confusion and frustration for customers on the Virgin Mobile platform, which aren’t currently able to access all the same benefits.” We suspect this might be part of the reason why there’s now been another big change.

According to a report on This is Money (Mail on Sunday), VMO2 is said to have issued a new letter to its bondholders, which in reference to the existing Vodafone MVNO deal stated that “notice has been given to cancel this agreement“. No further information has been provided by the newspaper and, since it’s Sunday, we probably won’t get any comment until Monday.

The news raises a number of questions, not least in terms of how much this will cost VMO2, what impact it will have on Virgin Mobile’s customers (another SIM swap?) and precisely when the agreement will be cancelled. We highly doubt they’d cancel the MVNO deal with immediate effect as it will take time to transition everybody on to O2’s platform, thus they’ll need to allow a year or so before the deal comes to a complete end.

UPDATE 14th Feb 2022 @ 6:33am

One of our readers (Credits to Adrian) has spotted that VMO2 actually made this statement in their previous Q2 2021 financial results, as part of an IFRS Bond Report. Buried deep on page 30 they state: “In November 2019, we entered into a new 5-year MVNO deal with Vodafone that enabled the launch of 5G services for our mobile customers in the U.K. in January 2021. Following the formation of the Joint Venture, notice has been given to cancel this MVNO agreement.” This may explain why it wasn’t spotted before.

UPDATE 14th Feb 2022 @ 9:56am

We’ve had a no comment response from VMO2.