Stelios has discovered that the UK mobile industry is in fact quite difficult, and his mobile arm EasyMobile is closing down in the next few weeks.

easyMobile.com in the UK was set up as a partnership between TDC (the telecom company from Denmark) and easyGroup (Stelios’ investment vehicle). Due to a change of strategy at TDC, TDC have decided to withdraw from the UK market.

Customers will no longer be able to use the service from midnight on December 13th, and will have until December 20th to switch to a new network.

easyMobile have made arrangements with Carphone Warehouse, where Carphone will take on any easyMobile customers and put them on Fresh Mobile, Carphone’s value mobile network. Easy are also offering to unlock customer’s handsets for free or help to port their number to any other network.

TDC said it was changing strategy – easymobile in Germany will be renamed callmobile and the UK business will close.

TDC’s CEO Jesper Theill Eriksen said: "we are withdrawing from the UK market, as the realised growth in the customer base does not live up to TDC’s original business plan expectations and as we do not believe that easyMobile UK has the potential to develop into a sizeable and profitable MVNO in the short term."