Reports that the US giant could enter the mobile phone market have been driving the industry for weeks.
(Photo: dpa)
Hamburg Reports about a planned mobile phone offer from the online mail order company Amazon have caused unrest in the telecommunications industry in recent months. New, unconfirmed information has now surfaced on social networks such as Twitter, which indicate that a high-speed flat rate for members of Amazon’s subscription service Prime will soon be launched in the USA.
The partner should therefore be the mobile phone provider Dish Networks, which is currently building its own 5G network. The Dish share price has risen by around 20 percent since the beginning of last week – probably also because of the speculation.
The Handelsblatt was also able to see a job advertisement that also points to an upcoming partnership. Dish published it on Tuesday night. Accordingly, the company is looking for a “Program Manager – Amazon” who will be responsible for working with a “major e-commerce partner”.
Amazon, which has always denied mobile phone ambitions, declined to comment on the new information. Dish left a query from the Handelsblatt unanswered.
Amazon is said to start selling the Boost Infinite offer shortly. The tariff is particularly attractive because it includes unlimited data volume and only costs 25 dollars a month. Amazon could offer it to new customers free of charge for the first month, it said. Boost is also featured in Dish’s current job listing.
Amazon’s offer could hit T-Mobile particularly hard
It is interesting that Boost once belonged to T-Mobile US, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom. In 2020, the sale of Boost was one of the conditions imposed by the US antitrust authorities in order to approve the merger between T-Mobile and Sprint, the fourth largest US mobile operator at the time.
Boost’s Infinite customers can therefore use both Dish’s 5G network, which now covers 70 percent of the USA, and the much more powerful T-Mobile network. It was not until June 2022 that Dish negotiated better conditions for network rental from T-Mobile.
According to the cooperation agreement, however, Dish may only sell mobile phone offers using the T-Mobile network under its own brands. However, indirect sales via partners cannot be ruled out. Dish has been under business pressure for months as the company is finding it difficult to finance further network expansion.
Should the speculation come true, that would be bad news for Deutsche Telekom. It is particularly dependent on its US business, which now accounts for around two-thirds of sales. Analysts estimate that a discount offer sold via Amazon would hit T-Mobile particularly badly, since the company has more price-sensitive customers than its competitors AT&T and Verizon.
The Bloomberg news agency and the Wall Street Journal last reported on negotiations between Amazon and Dish in early June. The t-share then fell in the meantime by more than nine percent.
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