BT vs Virgin Media vs Cable and Wireless vs Talk Talk
Posted by Birchills Telecom on Thu, Apr 08, 2010 @ 08:23 AM
The UK landline market place has changed more radically in the
last 2 months than ever before. For once BT the largest player hasn't reported a major change, however the others of the big 4, Virgin Media, Cable and Wireless and Talk Talk have had major events.
In date order:
Virgin Media
NTL: Telewest as a brand was unceremoniously dumped by Virgin as they rebranded their business offering to Virgin Media Business on February the 11th. That rebranding exercise seems to consist of deleting all references to NTL Telewest on all documents on their web site and replacing them with Virgin Media Business.
Mark Heraghty, Managing Director of Virgin Media Business, said: "We have big ambitions for Virgin Media Business. Delivering fabulous fundamentals - great service, good quality and value for money - is at the heart of our strategy. Over the last three years we've invested heavily to put the building blocks in place, which means we're more than fit to wear the Virgin badge."
Cable and Wireless Worldwide
Then on March 26 Cable and Wireless split in two and Cable and Wireless Worldwide were born. It is to concentrate on The Worldwide business (formerly Europe, Asia & US) specialising in offering communications services IP, data, voice and hosting to large enterprise, reseller and carrier customers. It operates globally, with core markets in UK, Asia and EMEA, and provides connectivity in 153 countries.
Talk Talk
Then on March 29 Talk Talk was admitted to the UK stock market following the demerger with Car Phone Warehouse. Their business offering is still branded as Opal (watch this space). They say Opal has a 15 year history and is well established within the SME market, currently offering voice, data services, telephony systems and mobile services to business customers in the UK.
Opal has 3 distinct channels to market, Small Business (Connect channel) - managing businesses up to 50 employees / customers, Large business and public sector (Consult channel) - managing organisations over 50 employees and all the way up to the FTSE 100 and resellers and dealers (Partner channel) - from dealers up to Systems Integrators
Financials
So let us compare their financials (all figures in £ millions, except employee numbers)
| |
BT |
Virgin Media |
C W W |
Talk Talk |
| Year end |
Mar-09 |
Dec-09 |
Mar-09 |
Mar-10 |
| Turnover (m £s approx) |
£21,390 |
£3,804 |
£3,646 |
£1,385 |
| Profit Before Tax |
-£134 |
-£338 |
£233 |
£115 |
| Market Capitalisation current |
£9,675 |
£4,164 |
£2,414 |
£1,235 |
| Employees |
111,000 |
11,000 |
13,000 |
1,500 |
| Debt |
£12,365 |
£5,934 |
£832 |
£862 |
The market capitalisations (number of shares times share price) are interesting with the markets clearly taking into account differing factors.
VoIP
It is interesting that none seem to be placing a great deal of emphasis on the hosted VoiP revolution that is headed down the tracks toward them. It will be interesting to see just how they react to when they see companies like Cloud Net taking an ever increasing proportion of their business systems revenues.
Written by David Hill, Chairman of Birchills Telecom