Hello and welcome to another MLEX podcast. I'm James Panicki, Mlex's Australasian Managing Editor,

coming to you from our offices in Melbourne, Australia. Great to have your company today.

Well, it was the merger

that would have changed the landscape of Australia's telecommunications industry forever.

An ambitious deal worth 15 billion Australian dollars, that's 10 billion US, bringing together

local telecommunications company, TPG Telecom, which was founded by Malaysian-born businessman David Tio, and Vodafone

Hutchison, Australia, which is the UK-Hong-K-Hong-G joint venture of those two companies.

The merged company would have been large enough to take the fight to the two companies

dominating the industry, Telstra and Optus Sing-Tel. Or at least that was how the narrative went.

Only one thing stood in the way of this storyline. Australia's Competition Regulator, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

And on Wednesday, the mergers prospects came crashing down in the most dramatic way possible, and we'll get onto that in just a moment.

Adding to that already combustible scenario was the shadow cast over the deal by an Australian

government ban on Chinese technology company Huawei from taking part in the country's

5G rollout. It's the type of regulatory drama that is Emlex's bread and butter,

and I'm joined from Sydney by senior correspondent Laurel Henning. Hello, Laurel. Hi, James.

Okay, Laurel, walk us through this case, starting from the phone companies involved and what

they've been trying to achieve. Sure. So, as you mentioned, with this case, we had a homegrown Australian company in TPG and then Vodafone,

the UK-Hong-C-Hong-Joint venture.

In terms of market shares, TPG is one of the top three Australian broadband providers.

It shares 85% of the market with other operators, Telstere and SingTEL Optus.

In the mobile market, Vodafone shares 87% of the market

with the same two other operators, but in that market, TPG has just 3% of market share.

...