Surely just a matter of time before Hutchison Whampoa acquires a telco here

Whatever you might think about Three Ireland's mobile services and coverage you have to admire Hong Kong parent Hutchison Whampoa for its staying power in the Irish market.

Three published its 2012 results yesterday. They were encouraging, with revenues up 16 per cent to €174 million and its market share rising by 1.3 percentage points to 9 per cent last year.

Its revenues have grown by 78 per cent in the past two years at a time when the market has been going the other way.

Comreg's latest market data report shows that mobile revenues in Ireland fell by 5.2 per cent last year to €1.55 billion. But Three is still loss-making eight years after its launch here, and fourth in the mobile market behind Vodafone, O2 Ireland and Meteor/eMobile.

At the end of 2011 its accumulated losses were a hefty €507 million, and last year it made a loss before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of €19 million.

Three Ireland chief executive Robert Finnegan has long talked about this being a marathon not a sprint for Hutch in Ireland, but even he must have expected the company to be closer to the finishing line by now.

Hutch, a conglomerate with tentacles in many industries worldwide, launched here just a couple of years before the crash and can argue that it had to rip up its business plan and start again.

Vodafone and O2 control about 70 per cent of the Irish market and made massive profits during the boom. Readjusting to the new reality of the marketplace where customers want more for less has arguably been more difficult for them than a newer, smaller player like Three, which has always built its proposition around keen prices and added-value services to try to pinch customers from the incumbents.

Three has nine years to go on its original 3G licence and Hutch has agreed to cough up another €105 million to acquire next-generation 4G licences from the government. So it is clearly not planning to fold its tent here anytime soon.

But how can it ever get a return for its money, especially when consumer spending on telecoms services continues to decline in this climate of austerity?

Acquisition is the obvious solution. It would give the company scale and efficiency savings.

Three/Hutch tried to gatecrash Eircom’s examinership about a year ago with a €2 billion cash offer.

Eircom’s lenders had already agreed a deal with the examiner that involved a debt writedown and them taking 100 per cent of the equity. This had been in the pipeline for some time and although the examiner trawled for suitors, he plumped for the original deal with lenders as being the best on offer. The Commercial Court wasn’t prepared to intervene on Three/Hutch’s behalf.

There has been much talk since of Hutch revisiting its Eircom bid but nothing has happened to date and the lenders probably wouldn’t sell right now.

Better to wait for Herb Hribar’s cost-cutting programme to gain traction alongside the substantial fibre investment.

By the time these are completed the economy should have turned and Eircom could see a return to growth after years of stagnation and generate a better sale price for its owners.

O2 Ireland, which has a 28 per cent share of mobile here and is the number two player behind Vodafone, is the other obvious target.

Rumours about Spanish operator Telefonica being prepared to sell its Irish business have circulated for a long time, although they have always been denied by the company.

Telefonica is Europe’s most indebted telco. Its net debt of €51.3 billion is higher than its market value. It sold certain assets last year and has looked at spinning out its Latin America business via an IPO.

Ireland is no longer a growth market and it’s hardly a stretch to believe that it might cash in its chips here.

One thing seems certain: consolidation in our broad telecoms sector is inevitable.

Ireland is not big enough or rich enough to support Eircom, Meteor, eMobile, Vodafone, O2, Three, Tesco Mobile, BT, UPC, Sky, Imagine, Digiweb, e-net, QSat and assorted others. The pie can only stretch so far.

Consolidation of sorts has already taken place with the mobile operators sharing networks rather than duplicating the costs of rolling out separate ones. Keeping up with the evolving technologies is a costly business and consolidation might actually be good for consumers in the long run in terms of investment and innovation by the operators.

With annual profits of €2.6 billion, Hutch has deep enough pockets to get this process rolling.