RE: BT accelerates cost-cutting as French tycoon circles31 Oct 2021 10:07
"If you can believe the media the above caption theres some on the BOD that would be happy to get round the table with Drahi"
"Chief executive Philip Jansen will announce that a target of £1bn in savings by March 2023 will be met at least a year early, City sources said.
The BT board was this weekend grappling with whether to announce new targets immediately or to wait until after Mr Drahi is allowed to launch a takeover in December."
Bkkbkk, I didn't interpret the comment in the same way; My reading of the relevant paragraph is that BT are moving forward with cost cutting faster than previously signalled, and may be looking at accelerating further cost cutting measures, and making even bigger savings than previously signalled. Drahi is the biggest shareholder in BT, of course the board will always talk to him, I'd go as far as suggesting that Drahi, Jansen, and Höttges have each other's mobile numbers.
BT's BOD apparently believe Drahi is in the midst of making some sort of move, and I think the BOD are mulling whether to make restructuring announcements until Drahi's plan becomes clear. I don't read it that some on the BOD are happy to discuss Drahi taking over.
It isn't clear what caused the rift between Jansen and Du Plessis, but since du Plessis and Patterson shared the same vision, it isn't too hard to see why du Plessis follows Patterson out of the door. I suspect the big thing separating du Plessis and Jansen was around BT sport, with Jansen wanting to focus on BT going back to its Telecom roots, and moving away from media provision. I agree with Jansen on this, media provision is expensive and the competitive environment is getting ever more crowded. On sport you've got DAZN, and Sky as the biggest players with other providers, like the BBC, also in the game. On the streaming side you have Netflix, Sky, Prime, Disney+, etc, etc, etc. Producing content constantly costs Billions, and all the streaming content providers will either have to price their service cheaply enough for viewers to subscribe to all, or many content providers will need to fail. I have Netflix and Amazon Prime, and even though Prime is thrown in with the delivery service, so "free", I seem to find more watchable content on Prime than Prime.
As a side note, if BT is on the verge of selling BT Sport they will possibly save a couple of Billion on football rights alone, up to 2025. Of course BT will lose the Sport subscription, but they wont necessarily lose the Broadband service as customers should seamlessly move onto the new DAZN platform.
https://news.sky.com/story/premier-league-extends-tv-broadcast-rights-deal-to-2025-12305022
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