In Germany we have supermarket mobile brands, too. They're usually just white-label services provided by other brands (e.g. ALDI Talk is owned by E-Plus, which is an actual carrier).
In fact, E-Plus itself seems to own multiple brands: BASE, Blau, ALDI Talk, Simyo, VIVA, JambaSIM and AY YILDIZ. So they're effectively just discount brands with different target audiences (e.g. AY YILDIZ offers discounted calls to Turkey and is marketed at the large Turkish-speaking minority).
I don't think E-Plus offers any mobile plans under its own brand at all, actually. Their own website links to BASE, which is their "regular" (non-discount) brand. They used to offer plans themselves in the past, though.
Confusingly there's also mobilcom-debitel (again owning several brands) which doesn't seem to be affiliated with any network operator and offers separate plans for the different networks. I think they did own some frequencies at some point and eventually sold them off, so that might at least explain why they exist at all (although I'm not sure how they can compete with the actual operators' own brands).
There are only four actual network operators in Germany: Telekom Deutschland (D1), Vodafone (D2), E-Plus (E1) and Telefónica Germany / O2 (E2). The frequencies for GSM, UMTS and LTE were auctioned off (D1/D2/E1/E2 referring to the original GSM frequencies of the D (GSM-900) and E (DCS-1800) networks).
There's actually a fifth operator on GSM: Deutsche Bahn (German railway). But they're obviously not in the phone business.
In fact, E-Plus itself seems to own multiple brands: BASE, Blau, ALDI Talk, Simyo, VIVA, JambaSIM and AY YILDIZ. So they're effectively just discount brands with different target audiences (e.g. AY YILDIZ offers discounted calls to Turkey and is marketed at the large Turkish-speaking minority).
I don't think E-Plus offers any mobile plans under its own brand at all, actually. Their own website links to BASE, which is their "regular" (non-discount) brand. They used to offer plans themselves in the past, though.
Confusingly there's also mobilcom-debitel (again owning several brands) which doesn't seem to be affiliated with any network operator and offers separate plans for the different networks. I think they did own some frequencies at some point and eventually sold them off, so that might at least explain why they exist at all (although I'm not sure how they can compete with the actual operators' own brands).
There are only four actual network operators in Germany: Telekom Deutschland (D1), Vodafone (D2), E-Plus (E1) and Telefónica Germany / O2 (E2). The frequencies for GSM, UMTS and LTE were auctioned off (D1/D2/E1/E2 referring to the original GSM frequencies of the D (GSM-900) and E (DCS-1800) networks).
There's actually a fifth operator on GSM: Deutsche Bahn (German railway). But they're obviously not in the phone business.