Telecommunications company takeovers and sales have been in the news in Brazil recently as a regional broadband provider plans to buy up three rivals and a delayed auction of a power group’s communications subsidiary is put back to later this year.
Unifique, a Brazilian regional ISP, has acquired three smaller broadband providers based in its home state of Santa Catarina. The three companies, which are said to serve a number of existing Unifique markets as well as some unserved areas, are Infoway, Snet and Station. The companies will add a total of 30,000 new customers to Unifique’s user base. It serves about 130,000 subscribers at present.
Meanwhile the planned sale of Copel Telecom, the telecommunications subsidiary of Companhia Paranaense de Energia, a state power company in Paraná, is expected to resume later this year, if market conditions permit. The company claims it has taken significant steps in making this happen and that, if it wasn’t for the coronavirus crisis, final approvals would already be well under way.
The coronavirus isn’t the only culprit, however. There had been a delay to the sale process earlier this year, after the Parana engineers’ union filed an injunction. This was because the divestment contract was allegedly assigned to Rothschild in July 2019 without a formal bidding process. That injunction has now been overturned. The sale, originally timed to take place in the first half of this year, is expected to generate around $173.4 million.
