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How many union officials does it take to change a light bulb?
None, they just sit in the dark complaining about capitalism. But come the light-bulb revolution everything will be brighter.
Might be the start of Global Services winning back/gaining more European business post Brexit. Shows that the tendering process in Europe is leaning towards impartiality.
Cont……
Bankers have pinned a price of between £20billion and £40billion on Openreach alone.
Russian aggression in Ukraine is likely to send investors even more hastily towards stable infrastructure assets.
So what if BT chooses to sell Openreach? Support from a major corporate owner, and one with the sympathetic ear of Government, suits the business right now, Selley says.
'I get great support from BT. What I'm doing is no cheap hobby. They're showing great confidence in us.
'They are behaving as a very good owner and they accept a business case that has a very long payback.
'It's very clear that our future depends on building the best national fibre platform, irrespective of ownership structures.'
But he stops short of speculating on any possible sale, one forced by Drahi or anyone else, adding: 'BT is our 100 per cent owner, so I won't be getting a vote.'
The 60-year-old has just marked six years as chief executive at a fascinating juncture – as Openreach becomes an ever more crucial chapter of BT's business story.
Openreach's status as BT's crown jewel is a recent development. Previously the huge merger with EE took the limelight, then the swashbuckling TV sports division.
But a change in tack by Jansen, boss since 2019, has put Openreach at the fore – with its importance underscored by the pandemic.
We meet in Openreach's modest headquarters in London's King's Cross while, across town, the paint is still drying on BT's glitzy new 18-storey global headquarters.
Selley himself is straight talking and matter of fact, a human manifestation of his business – a practical worker bee to its owner's more glamorous queen.
Asked whether he wants anything from the Government at the Chancellor's Spring Statement tomorrow, he thinks more about the logistics needed to get his new electric vans on roads than headline corporate tax cuts.
The Government limits grants on new electric-powered vans to 1,000 a year. He says increasing that will allow 'large fleet operators' like his to drive new production in British factories and help channel the cycle of second-hand vans often used by small firms on to the market more quickly.
He's also struck a pilot deal with Sky. The agreement allows Sky to hook up their customers to Openreach broadband at the same time as installing its TV service.
But it seems one of his biggest headaches is battling for permission to access commercial tower blocks. Frequently, landlords simply don't respond.
In the City of London, for example, landlords' most commonly registered address is a PO Box in the British Virgin Islands tax haven. He wants legal access rights.
'All we want to do is replace the copper with fibre,' Selley laments. 'You can't phone, email, they don't have a contact name. You write and nothing comes back.'
It's an odd problem for the man who wants to turbocharge Britain's internet communications.
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-10636689/Were-not-ready-BT-hang-just-says-Openreach-boss.html.
Clive Selley is no stranger to the billionaire businessman stalking the group.
The boss of BT's gigantic cables network Openreach has met Patrick Drahi several times over the years to share ideas about the fast-changing industry, he reveals.
That was before Drahi, who controls European telecoms giant Altice, showed his hand and pounced on £3.2billion of BT's stock last year – 18 per cent of the British group.
The meetings, from Selley's point of view, were fruitful. Openreach wanted to find ideas from its competitors that he could incorporate into his own broadband network.
'We scoured the world for best practice,' Selley says, explaining the history of his meetings with the French-Israeli telecoms mogul across Portugal and France.
But it's easy to imagine, looking back, that Drahi – who also owns auction house Sotheby's – was already then sizing up the group in an altogether different way.
Drahi is known for ruthless cost-cutting. But he has also invested heavily into fibre in his businesses in Portugal, France, Israel and the US after a series of debt-fuelled deals.
He has been publicly supportive of Openreach's strategy to roll out full-fibre broadband and it is busy replacing ageing copper lines to bring rapid fibre to 25m homes by the end of 2026, hiring thousands of staff in the process. BT is spending £15billion on it.
The move, which will see an end to our old landlines, has raised eyebrows even though BT contends the service will improve.
Selley’s more recent conversations with Drahi, this time with BT chief Philip Jansen, arguably sound less enlightening than previous ones. 'I do not know what he wants,' admits Selley, all too frankly.
But the City has been awash with speculation. Among the theories is a full, politically tricky, takeover tilt at BT. Or that he may bully bosses into selling Openreach to generate a huge cash windfall, possibly paving the way for a takeover or a bumper dividend.
But the business is part of the fabric of the country. Openreach is BT's infrastructure arm that manages phone and internet lines for 28m homes.
It handles cables stretching from Cornwall to northern Scotland and its vans are a familiar sight on Britain's roads.
Its engineers have been battling to keep the nation connected to a service that has become even more vital as people have worked from home during the pandemic.
Openreach was forced to legally separate from BT in 2017 over competition concerns, but remains a division of the group.
The Mail on Sunday last year revealed private equity firms including CVC and Apax have run the rule over Openreach in case a sale process begins.
BT selects Google Cloud as strategic partner for group-wide data and AI transformation.
Collaboration will involve BT using Google’s enhanced data and AI capabilities at every level of its business to deliver personalised customer experiences and continue its commitment to creating societal value through responsible, inclusive, and sustainable tech.
Google Cloud will support BT with a full spectrum of products and services, from secure cloud infrastructure to advanced machine learning tools.
Access to Google Cloud’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) experts will help drive the cultural change needed to enable BT to operate a data and AI platform in the cloud at scale.
Sunnyvale, Calif., and London, UK [10 March 2022]: - Today, Google Cloud and BT announced a strategic, five-year partnership to accelerate BT’s company-wide digital transformation. The collaboration will involve BT using a suite of Google Cloud products and services—including cloud infrastructure, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, security, and API management—to deliver superior customer experiences, reduce costs and risk, and build new revenue streams……………
Indeed BP, Spurs won’t be getting a sponsorship deal from Duraglit, anytime soon.
What will come first? £3+ for a BT share or Spurs winning something, I can pick’em.
Fairly decent gesture.
RGKXD23,
Can’t say that was too much of a rant, you’ve said in 4 or 5 paragraphs what some of us have said in 5 or 6 posts, or 5 or 6 months. BT sold Cellnet and Yell/Yellow Pages back then when BT had £28b of Debt, I remember Standard and Poors and Moodys monthly assault on BT’s credit rating on the back Of dot.com bubble, BT’s rating travelled from AAA through to BBB just above junk and therefore the interest rates were scary, BT had to reduce that debt, and in doing so, some of the Crown Jewels were sold.
I guess this helps spread the cost into an additional financial year. Which helps next years EBITDA in spreading some labour costs and Asset write-downs into the 2022-23 year.
Covid blamed for six-month delay as Sir Iain Duncan Smith warns it increases threat to UK.
The Government has delayed its plan to remove Huawei from Britain’s telecoms network by six months, blaming Covid.
Ministers had intended on cutting the share of Huawei equipment to 35pc of the full fibre and 5G access networks by January next year, following concerns that its equipment could be used by China for espionage or to disrupt the UK’s critical national infrastructure.
However, on Friday night the Government said the deadline had been pushed back to July 31 2023, “due to the difficulties providers have faced during the pandemic”.
It comes as the Government launched a consultation with telecoms firms on proposed legal instruments to mandate the removal of all Huawei equipment from 5G networks by the end of 2027.………
The rest is pretty much politics.
Cont…..
Rivals have privately questioned the sustainability of Dazn’s business model. It charges relatively low prices like a streaming provider but competes for football and other expensive rights with pay-TV operators such as Sky who are able to charge consumers more. Meanwhile, owing to the live nature of sports rights, it is not able to build up lasting intellectual property as Netflix does via its original productions.
Dazn’s has partly pinned its hopes of making returns on gambling, plans which became a factor in BT’s decision to seek an alternative deal for BT Sport. Sir Leonard hired Shay Segev, the former boss of Ladbrokes owner Entain, as joint-chief executive of Dazn last year and in January put him in sole charge of the company.
The billionaire has diversified his financial interests, with a particular interest in media in recent years. As well as Dazn and Warner Music, Sir Leonard owns production companies and the Theatre Royal Haymarket. He was knighted in 2017 for philanthropy after investing £50m into an extension of the Tate Modern and donating £75m to Oxford University.
The company's latest accounts covering the period before the pandemic showed losses had swelled to $1.9bn for the year to December 2019, compared to $731m loss the year before. Dazn’s accounts for the year to the end of December 2020 are overdue at Companies House and are expected to reveal a heavy blow from the pandemic. By the end of 2019 it had accumulated a deficit of more than £2.3bn and had committed to spend $6.5bn on sports rights.
Mr Mayer has previously been open about the company’s ambitions on home turf.
In September he said: "We would love to have the English Premier League, [but] there are many paths to get there.” The next round of bidding for Premier League rights will not come until the latest deals run out in 2025, after Sky, Amazon and BT agreed to roll over their £5bn deal in May.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/02/18/britains-richest-man-pours-another-43bn-sports-streamer-dazn/
No point throwing money at the company now, if you had not been so penny pinching or pernickety with the BT Sport acquisition, you may have has a bargain at £800m.
Sir Leonard Blavatnik has agreed a $4.3bn (£3.2bn) refinancing of his loss-making attempt to conquer sport television, Dazn, despite its failure to hit the target in a bid to acquire BT Sport.
Britain’s richest man has agreed to convert billions in shareholder loans to shares in the London-based streaming provider and inject a further $250m cash. The moves left Dazn - pronounced "da zone" - debt-free at the end of 2021 and is designed to underpin its growth after its disappointment on BT Sport.
Sir Leonard, who was born in Ukraine and made a fortune in the post-Soviet commodities industry, backed Dazn to bid £800m for BT Sport in what would have been a radical expansion of its UK business. The deal was also viewed as a potential prelude to a stock market float of Dazn that would have allowed its billionaire owner to share the burden of building the “Netflix of sport”.
However, after months of fraught negotiations BT decided to pursue a joint venture with the US broadcaster Discovery. The rival discussions, first revealed by The Telegraph, came as a surprise to Dazn.
The company, spun off from the former FTSE 250 gambling data provider Perform, has accumulated billions of pounds of losses in an international expansion effort that has included buying live sports rights in Japan, Germany, Italy and the United States. Sir Leonard, 64 and also the majority shareholder in the major record label Warner Music, has bankrolled the vast majority of those losses.
His support has helped the streaming service embark on a relentless deal spree to ensure it remains filled with original programming for its near 10m subscribers that span more than 200 countries.
Last year Dazn became the lead broadcaster of top-flight football in Italy, bought La Liga football rights in Spain, launched Bundesliga football coverage in Germany, secured UEFA Women's Champions League rights and reached a five-year boxing deal.
Most of its new financial settlement with Sir Leonard’s holding company Access Industries was sealed on December 29, just two weeks before BT ended talks with Dazn, when it was widely believed the company was racing towards a float. It said the $250m cash injection was agreed later.
Kevin Mayer, the former senior Disney executive and TikTok chief hired as Dazn’s chairman, said: “This backing by Access represents a strong vote of confidence in Dazn’s strategy, progress and future growth opportunities. Dazn is leading the transformation of how fans engage with sport, has quickly become the world’s leading sports streaming broadcaster."…….
Tuesday 15 February 2022 8:14 am BT pumps £30m into tech freelancing start up By: Charlie Conchie - Telecoms giant BT has pumped £30m into a tech freelancing start up which helps business transform their digital systems, as it looks to ramp up its own modernisation efforts. BT bosses revealed they had taken a stake in Distributed, which provides firms with freelancers with expertise in AI and cloud computing, as the firm looks to tap into high growth tech startups via a new division it set up to back fast-growth tech firms. Distributed, led by former musician Callum Adamson, said the backing from BT was a “huge milestone” for the firm. Mark Murphy, a technology executive at BT will also take a board seat at Distributed, while BT’s start up growth director will join as an observer. The investment from BT marks the latest step in the firm’s efforts to ramp up modernisation efforts after hiring tech executive Harmeen Mehta as chief digital and innovation officer last year. Mehta said the investment in Distributed would help “accelerate the digital revolution within BT and help to make it and the UK a key hub for the digital innovation economy.” BT has been going through a period of transition under chief executive Philip Jansen, who has outlined plans to cut 13,000 jobs and slash 270 of BT’s 300 UK offices. Bosses have come under pressure to deliver growth after shareholder Patrick Drahi increased his stake from 12 per cent to 18 per cent, sparking speculation that he was preparing to launch a takeover bid. Jansen has been looking to strip layers of bureaucracy and create a more agile workforce since joining the firm three years ago from payments firm Worldpay. City A.M.
Drahi can do what he likes (within reason) should he get his hands on BT. Remember sum of the parts are more than the Market Cap, he can put the network into a separate entity, and sell off EE, Consumer, Global and Enterpise, and keep OR and the network. If that’s what he is trying to achieve. Whatever he chooses, He’ll be in the money!!
Given we saw £2 today, all too briefly and we still finished up, ever so slightly on the day. Not to bad.
200.09, just for mo, hopefully we’re there, but might have to break it another 3 or 4 times.
“ Andy Kerr said that he was also “extremely disappointed” that BT had chosen this course of action and that “we’re pushing hard for any future proposals to include this union at a much earlier stage, to give us the full opportunity to put together an alternative, in-house proposal.”
Maybe, if you (CWU) had engaged with BT in a more positive manner in recent history, BT may have put you in the full picture sooner. You reap what you sow.
Seems DAZN played a bad poker hand from what the Telegraph has been saying……
Sources claim Dazn could have sealed a takeover of BT Sport months ago, but had become bogged down in the commercial details as it relentlessly sought better terms.
Every time BT had ironed out a concern thrown up by Dazn, another issue would arise and bring progress to a halt, an insider says.
Among the hurdles were long-term guarantees Dazn wanted from BT to cover the costs of BT Sport if customers cancelled their subscriptions. BT is believed to have refused.
Dazn's deal team is also understood to have miscalculated Discovery's interest. It viewed it as a stalking horse when The Telegraph revealed the US broadcaster's intent in December.
Yet Discovery was not playing any games as talks dragged late into Wednesday night at BT's new offices in Aldgate on the edge of the City.
Marc Allera, the head of BT’s consumer division, and the company’s deal team wrangled over the finer details of the two offers as they raced towards deadline. The board eventually settled on Discovery, before the decision was revealed to the market hours later on Thursday morning.
…….Will no one rid me of this turbulent Tang, step forward 4 knights.