MasOrange managed to beat its monthly portability record thanks to the mega contract obtained from the Central State Administration last July. The operator led by Meinrad Spenger obtained a net portability balance – the procedure that allows you to change company while maintaining your number – of 89,900 fixed broadband lines. In addition to achieving the best result in its history, it breaks a streak of consecutive monthly losses over the last year and a half, since Orange and MásMóvil merged in April 2024 to create MasOrange.
The orange operator even beat Digi, which obtained 22,800 broadband accesses, although the Romanian operator remains the absolute leader in mobile telephony, where it gained 74,000 lines in October at the expense of its rivals.
The cause of this historic reversal of direction is that the migration of the thousands of lines affiliated with the Central Administration began in October. MasOrange was purchased for 112 million euros with lot 2 of fixed and mobile voice telephony services called CORA III (Commission for the reform of public administrations, in its third edition), which brings together more than 120 entities, under the coordination of the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Services.
MasOrange has not only reversed the negative trend in the broadband segment, where in September it had given up 14,000 landlines and internet. The situation has also improved significantly in mobile telephony, as 34,000 lines were lost in October, but this is the smallest monthly decline so far this year, which can also be attributed to the central administration as a new customer.
Before the new CORA III tender, Telefónica was the company providing these fixed and mobile services. As a result, the Spanish branch of the multinational led by Borja de Nicolás sold 107,500 broadband lines in October, also changing the positive portability trend accumulated so far this year. In mobile telephony, Movistar maintained a gain of 20,900 customers. The company just achieved its highest quarterly result in 25 years, gaining 4,800 broadband lines and 63,000 mobile lines between July and the end of September.
Contract cancelled
In July, MasOrange was also awarded lot 3 of CORA III for cybersecurity and data center interconnection services. In addition to the sum of 104 million euros, the prize was important because it is a strategic sector for state security. But the Ministry for Digital Transformation canceled the prize based on the appeal filed by Telefónica according to which TRC and Mnemo, the partners that were part of the ATI with MasOrange, did not have a plan for gender equality, a requirement to participate in the competition according to its rules.
Consequently, this body awarded the contract to Telefónica for 76.3 million euros “to be the offer with the best quality-price ratio for the Administration”.
Telefónica, 10% owned by the State, filed an appeal last August before the Central Administrative Court of Contractual Resources (TACRC), a body dependent on the Ministry of Finance, responsible for resolving appeals against public contracts from the Government which decided to suspend the award to MasOrange.
MasOrange challenged the TARC decision “deeming it disproportionate and contrary to European doctrine” since the annulment was due to a formal issue, the “alleged absence” of an equal footing by one of the UTE partners which, in any case, has already been corrected. “In this case the European doctrine applies the principle of self-cleaning or self-correction according to which it is not appropriate to maintain the exclusion from a competition for formal issues that have already been corrected”, assure company sources.
MasOrange maintains that the resolution does not call into question the quality of the offer, which obtained the best evaluation both in the technical solution, the most relevant in a context of this type, and in the economic proposal. The hiring table scores of MasOrange and Telefónica were very similar. In the technical-quantitative evaluation, the two groups obtained the maximum score in all chapters, for a total of 26 points each. But MasOrange lowered its financial offer by 8 million compared to that of Telefónica, which led it to win the competition, with a score of 89.94 points, against 85.76 of its rival.
The award to MasOrange was not free from controversy as it drew attention to the fact that it snatched the cybersecurity lot from Telefónica, its traditional winner, since one of the reasons given by the Government for Telefónica’s entry into the capital through SEPI in 2024 or later was precisely its strategic nature for the security of state communications.
