BT Group Results

The Financial Times Opinion on BT's results talks about the strategy risking a Kodak moment, in doing so they fail to address the Elephant in the Room. This must be music to the ears of  CEO Gavin Patterson.

If the Company is to be turned around, then the job cuts need to be about the closing of businesses that have no future and the loss of 13,000 members of staff is not enough.  Global Services is not a business that works and looks more like Carillion than a magic money tree. The idea that BT Vision can get customers to pay more for services that are not core  has been proven wrong and thus is now the time to close the business?

Yet these plans were not addressed in the presentation rather short terms issues of investment in Next Generation Investment and statutory requirements for funding Pension requirements where the focus. 

If BT Group is to be turned around I do not think that Gavin Patterson is capable of leading the job, and that they need to find talent from outside the company capable of leading the restructure as well as changing the relationship with regulators if the business is to have a future. 

Did Liberty Global just pay Arthur D Little to publish research that shows it has very little future?

Having spent some time reading Arthur D Little's latest report, Unlocking GigaWorld Innovation, I have to ask why was Liberty Global associated with it?

If you liked the @adlittle report, you can find out more about our #GIGAworld campaign here at https://t.co/yFaVPj4fnu

— Liberty Global (@libertyglobal) September 20, 2017

If you take the time to read the report very little of what the outline can be served by the services currently sold by Liberty Global unless I have missed them building a massive Business Services unit to match those of BT Global Services and Vodafone Enterprise Services. The report in itself seems to be of the sort written by Analysts in order to justify a particular market and has a degree of optimism even a Blockchain booster my call over confident.

If the report is a forecast of what is happening rather than what might then Liberty Global does not have the product portfolio or workforce that is capable of grabbing the opportunities and thus faces the terminal decline of a British High Street shopping chain that failed to engage suitably with the Digital Consumer.

Go take a look and tell me if I'm fooling myself!

Virgin Media investment plans

Over the weekend Virgin Media revealed it's latest investment plans to The Telegraph. It is seeking to expand it's network asking Liberty Global to increase it's investment to grow the footprint of it's Fibre network a £3bn plan to grow from 50% of households covered to almost 66%.   

Given that interest rates are at all time lows and Virgin have said that the investment has a good return in growing the customers base in areas where they are new entrants rather than established provider why are they not seeking to be aggressive and double the investment? The reports on broadband coverage in Britain say that the costs are not commercial for just the last 10% of households and so the capacity is there to almost double what Virgin already has. 

We could say that Liberty Global is being cautious given the uncertainty around Brexit and its economic impact or as a Global player the upside of investment outside of the UK is greater than inside.  One option would be for Virgin to become more of a player within the Business market which its brand does not speak to other than in the small business sector, some players are realising that BT is providing a very poor quality service.   

Is Virgin gaming the market to such an extent that it knows that investment is infrastructure is like betting on England's football team? It needs to stay in the game and the cost of new customers is lower in areas that it is an entrant to rather than established in that they are likely to buy a bundled service bigger than that established customers.