The strategic implications of European Union expansion for mobile telecommunications companies

The European Union (EU) has recently been significantly enlarged with the addition of ten countries. This was expected to induce telecommunications operators in the original EU15 to invest heavily in operators in the accession countries. This paper seeks to analyse the extent to which this has occurred in practice. The results show that there has been no uniform response by operators in the EU15 to the onset of accession, and rather less investment overall than had been anticipated. This is explained by a variety of factors such as lack of investments providing majority control, financial constraints and the desire to cluster investments.