Vodafone’s black forest addiction

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MainFT:

The UK telecoms industry will receive its biggest shake-up in years after the country’s competition regulator on Thursday approved the £16.5bn merger of Vodafone’s domestic business with CK Hutchison’s Three UK. The move from four to three mobile operators marks a milestone for the sector.

The telecoms companies were toasting the competition regulator’s approval (with conditions) of their long-awaited domestic merger yesterday.

Vodafone, in a celebratory mood, hailed the merger on X as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform the UK’s digital infrastructure”.

Meanwhile, over on LinkedIn, group chief executive Margherita Della Valle said the decision would create “a new force in the UK’s telecoms market”:

Another executive committee member at the FTSE 100 group, Joakim Reiter, chief external and corporate affairs officer, shared the same image on LinkedIn.

Eagle-eyed observers may have noticed that it wasn’t just UK telecoms where Vodafone was introducing newness and transformation.

The image accompanying such pronouncements had a certain Teutonic whiff to it:

Could Vodafone really have illustrated its major UK merger news with a photo of a town that’s… not in the UK?

The answer: absolutely it could.

A picturesque spot in Gechingen, a town in the south-west of Germany, could be considered an unusual choice to mark the creation of what is expected to be Britain’s largest mobile operator.

But, unmistakably, the image is “Aerial view of sunrise over a small village in the Black Forest, Gechingen, Germany” — no doubt a favourite among stock photo fans, and purchasable via Getty if you want a copy for your wall / telecoms company.

It was a “surprise that something so obvious slipped through checks”, and marked “an inauspicious start to their focus on UK investment”, said a person in the industry.

What’s more bizarre is that Vodafone had already been warned about this. Here’s the Sunday Times’s Will Turvill writing for its Prufrock column (print only, very trad) more than two months ago:

[It] was odd to see the site set up to lobby for the deal, vodafoneandthree.uk, out of service for much of last week. When it did come back online, visitors were greeted with a photograph of a picturesque rural town at sunset overlaid with the words: “Great for Customers. Great for the Country.”

But which country? For the conurbation pictured was Gechingen in Germany. When Prufrock asked the companies to explain why the photograph was not of a UK town — perhaps one that might benefit from their glorious merger — the site swiftly went offline again. The verdict of one rival: “Quite funny!” We think that’s schadenfreude.

Clearly though, someone can’t get enough of that Gechingen sunrise. Perhaps the CMA needs to add a few more conditions, such as forcing Vodafone staff to play a few hours of GeoGuessr on UK mode?

Vodafone declined to comment on the choice of image.