Iliad aims to bring French disruption to Italian mobile market

French telco group Iliad has become Italy’s fourth mobile operator and is following the same playbook as it did in France.

Iliad-owned Free Mobile became France’s fourth MNO in 2012 and significantly disrupted the market with an aggressive pricing strategy, leading to much pouting, shrugging and moaning from the three incumbents. The result today is a 17% subscriber share, so Iliad quite reasonably seems to think it’s worth repeating that strategy in Italy.

The brand isn’t Free, or even Libero in Italy, however. The company is simply going for Iliad there, perhaps gambling that the birthplace of the Roman empire will appreciate the classical reference. There seems to have been little fanfare, with the very brief press release pointing hacks towards the Italian language website. Thanks for that Xavier.

The headline deal does seem a very aggressively-priced one. The first million subscribers will get a SIM-only deal that gives 30GB data, unlimited voice minutes and unlimited texts for just €6 per month. That’s so cheap it’s hard to see how Iliad can possibly make any money from it and it will be interesting to see how the company proceeds once it hits that threshold.

The CEO of Iliad Italia, Benedetto Levi, has created a Twitter account to celebrate and apparently intends to use it primarily to pick fights with his competitors a la Legere in the US. Judging by the political turmoil currently taking place in Italy it seems ripe for disruption right now, so we wouldn’t bet against Iliad Italia hitting the million mark pretty quickly.