KPN heads Dutch pay TV decline as Vodafone Ziggo stems losses

Our belief that Dutch cable operators UPC and Ziggo should never have been allowed to merge in the first place – even before the combined operation was acquired by Vodafone – have only been confirmed by subsequent events, including the very latest Q2 results. Yet it was only in May 2019 when the merger between Vodafone and Liberty Global, the parent company of Ziggo, was finally cleared in a ruling by the European Court of Justice, after a complaint by the company’s dominant telco KPN against the earlier decision by the European Commission to approve the merger. Our argument was that the successive mergers of Liberty Global’s UPC firstly with Ziggo and then Vodafone created a combined company dominant in more than…