Auna

» see auna.es as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Auna was dismantled in the summer and autumn of 2005 by the people who owned it. On 27 July France Telecom announced it was buying 80 percent of Amena, the mobile business, for 6.4 billion euros in cash, a deal that put an enterprise value of 10.6 billion on the whole of Amena. Four days later the cable and fixed-line half went to ONO for about 2.25 billion; Banco Santander's own filing on 1 August put the figure at 2,251 million euros including 237 million of debt. The ONO purchase closed in November. After that there was no Auna left to run.

The group was Spain's answer to a problem the whole of Europe had in the 1990s, which was a state telephone monopoly with no serious competitor. Retevisión, the broadcast transmission operator, was turned into the vehicle for one. It launched the EresMás brand for internet access, picked up a mobile license that became Amena, and in 2002 merged with the AunaCable group, five regional cable companies covering different parts of the country: Madritel, Menta, Supercable, Able and Canarias Telecom. The combined thing took the name Auna, and the shareholders behind it were Endesa and Unión Fenosa, the two big electricity groups, with Banco Santander alongside them.

What they built actually worked. By 30 June 2005 Amena had 9.7 million mobile customers and about 24 percent of the Spanish market, and the fixed and internet side had 2 million customers including 526,000 ADSL lines, which was roughly 16 percent of Spanish broadband. France Telecom's own description of what it was acquiring called it a first tier challenger able to offer converged services. That is a company in reasonable health being sold, not a rescue.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the buyer that said no first ~

In November 2004 Auna had tried to buy ONO, offering 2,400 million euros. ONO turned it down. Twelve months later ONO bought the half of Auna it had refused to be bought by, for roughly the same money, and the combined cable operator came out with more than 1.7 million customers across about 6 million homes passed, on revenue of 1,726 million euros. Whichever way that negotiation had gone in 2004, one of the two names was not going to exist in 2006.

~ why the owners sold ~

Read the shareholder list rather than the market share if you want the ending to make sense. Electricity companies and a bank had funded a telecoms challenger through the capital-hungry years, and by 2005 they were holding an asset worth a great deal of money in a business they had no long-term reason to be in. Selling the mobile arm to a French incumbent and the cable arm to a domestic rival returned that money to the shareholders and closed the experiment.

For the Spanish market the effect was that the challenger stopped being Spanish. Amena became part of France Telecom and kept its own name into 2006 before the Orange badge replaced it. Orange later brought the Amena name back as a low-cost brand in 2012 and retired it again about a decade after that, which means the name outlasted the group that built it by some sixteen years.

~ the pieces now ~

auna.es does not resolve, and neither does auna.com. The www host on the .com does reply, with a redirect to a Vodafone Spain splash page, because Vodafone bought ONO in 2014 and inherited the address along with the cable network. The route from a liberalization-era national challenger to a splash screen belonging to a British operator took nine years.

Two of the other names in this story already have graves here. EresMás was Auna's own internet brand, and Terra belonged to Telefónica, the monopoly Auna had been assembled to compete with.

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