RE: Bad decision by anti-Jansen, pro-Du Plessis, article out6 Mar 2021 08:51
There you go Velo.
On the face of it, losing a chairman like Jan Du Plessis is a major blow to BT. Diminutive he might be, but the South African comes with a big, tough reputation - more bulldog than chihuahua - and is a veteran of multiple top-level boardrooms.
Yet, it seems he may have been more bark than bite when it came to forcing through change at BT. Du Plessis blamed the demands of decades at the top for his decision to step down prematurely.
That said, rumours of a rift with boss Philip Jansen over the pace of the company’s restructuring are longstanding.
The chairman’s priority was improving relations with the regulator but Jansen favoured an unflinching overhaul including the possible sale of a stake in BT’s Openreach arm.
Du Plessis’s exit is certainly badly timed. A crucial and long-awaited Ofcom decision on fibre wholesale pricing is due later this month.
Now Sky News reports that Jansen threatened to go unless Du Plessis was replaced. Chairman and chief executives clash all the time but this suggests the relationship had broken down completely, at a crucial time in BT’s turnaround too.
Perhaps his exit will accelerate transformation in the way Jansen hopes. Thousands of cuts have been made but more are needed and although the chief executive is desperate to crack on, BT is a notoriously sclerotic beast.
Decades after privatisation, the bureaucracy of state ownership still festers, making decision-making painfully slow. The tendency inside BT is to wait for the government or regulator to force decisions upon it, rather than tackling problems head on.
Ultimately though, Jansen may live to regret his coup. His planned shake-up is high-risk and will win few friends. Selling a stake in Openreach to private equity just as the government pushes ahead with plans for a nationwide broadband rollout would be highly contentious.
And the value destruction of the last few years has been shocking: a 70pc fall in the share price in five years has left BT with a stockmarket value of not much more than the £12.5bn it forked out on mobile operator EE in 2016.
With Du Plessis gone, the pressure on his adversary to deliver will be even more intense.
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