Avantel

"We made our first foray in 2019 when we acquired a majority stake in the bankrupt Colombian telecoms company Avantel, merged it with a vehicle that we had used to buy Colombian mobile telecoms spectrum, and renamed the whole operation WOM Colombia. We then set about investing in infrastructure projects in Colombia over the next five years. Following a bandwidth auction, we won 20 MHz in the 700 MHz spectrum and 30 MHz in the 2,500 MHz spectrum. We then invested in building WOM Colombia’s network, installing more than 8,000 antennae and 3,000 additional towers, and created 2,500 direct and more than 5,000 indirect jobs, with an average age of 32 for recruits. We were probably Colombia’s largest recruiter, opening 147 stores in one year alone. Altogether, we have invested $1 billion of equity in WOM Colombia. We betted heavily that the strategy that had worked so well in Chile would resonate with customers in the much larger Colombian market. It often surprises Europeans that Colombia is the second largest market in South America, after Brazil but before Argentina and Peru, with an official population of more than 57 million, plus what is reported to be more than 5 million Venezuelans."

"The real trouble this time around was that this time the incumbent operators were ready and waiting for us. In the first five months after we acquired Avantel, we were hit with no fewer than 38 separate lawsuits challenging our right to exist as a player in the Colombian mobile telecoms market. There was a torrent of complaints from existing mobile telecoms operators to Colombia’s Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications, the Commission for the Regulation of Communications and the National Spectrum Agency. In Chile we had taken the competition by surprise and wrong-footed them all. But in Colombia, where the opposition was largely made up of the same players, they put up much more of a fight. The established operators used dirty tactics, waiting for regulators to intervene before agreeing to behave fairly. There were unnecessary problems with networks, bandwidth, service levels and delays with setting up connections and allowing mobile customers to port their numbers. Nobody would give us an inch. It was basically hand-to-hand combat every day in the market."