British mobile phone group mmO2 formally demerged from British Telecommunications today, and its newly listed shares were slightly higher in heavy morning trade.
MmO2 is made up of Digifone in Ireland, BT Cellnet in Britain, Viag in Germany and Telfort in the Netherlands. All these will be renamed O2 in the first half of next year - a united brand strategy common to many mobile players.
At 81p, Europe's sixth-largest mobile phone company was valued at £6.9 billion ($9.8 billion). A week of conditional trade in its shares ended on Friday with mmO2 at 80p, higher than many analysts had expected but far below initial expectations of around 130p.
Mm02 was by far the market's busiest share in early trade as many BT shareholders decided to unload shares they received in the riskier mobile business, and buyers snapped them up in anticipation of a recovery.
Some 75 million shares changed hands by 9.30 a.m. - twice the level of the second largest volume stock Vodafone.
MmO2, which will also be traded on the New York Stock Exchange, replaces financial publisher and research group United Business Media in London's FTSE 100 blue-chip index.
Shares in BT were 1.5 per cent higher at 280p, valuing mmO2's slimmed parent at just under £24 billion. Every BT shareholder received a matching number of mmO2 shares, or 8,521,500,000.
The company has described the O2 brand as modern and universal, saying the mm in the group name did not stand for anything specific, but could be taken to mean multimedia or 2000 in Roman numerals.