Member Info for scallywag3

Trotsky, they used the cash that would have given you the usual increase in dividend, your only getting 2% now. Not only are they saving the 40M in less shares , they are also paying less to shareholders around 180M each year. An annual saving in the region of 220M The divedend is quite remarkable as it is.

This years Buyback, saves LGEN paying out around £40m in dividends next year and every year. Cash in the bank.

Canada Pension Plan Investment Board ... Shorting BT Again.

Foreign companies should be banned from Shorting UK companies. No wonder UK investment is diabolically low with these parasitic ba5tards creaming off the top.

Little bit of a correction here.. not 25mm duct, thats what i used from the road into my house supplied from Openreach, I have a complicated access with lots of tarred and block areas and installed it myself. The duct which would have run along verge of the road WASN'T laid which would have been larger. The road being 2 miles long with 27 properties. Openreach engineer informed me that is what is happening in all of his area. They stopped using duct.

Bt/Openreach stopped using 25mm duct in the area I live. They have for a while been putting the fibre direct into ground. The Openreach guys I know aren't keen on that happening ( if a repair is required, A length of fibre would have been easy shoved through, but now requires a lenght dug in ) I can see reason for it now, competitin once again sitting on our back sucking us dry, should we use duct. Once again interference from Ofcom detimental to the customer who will have to wait longer for more costly reapairs.

UBS raises BT price target to 135 (120) pence - 'sell'

or a Lunatic Asylum

Thanks Fleccy.

My gf, had FTTP put in by BT a little over a year ago, it included a new pole and quite a bit of work, she paid nothing extra for that. the service was great , what a step up from copper from the exchange. A year later she moved to Sky, £10 a month cheaper than BT with BT having their automatice annual increase. However, with Sky it more often than not takes around 6 to 9 seconds to access or change pages. Very Annoying.

I thought Sky ran off BT and would just be a change of name on the Bill, Yet this access delay never happend with BT.

I get my FTTP from BT later this year, I fully intend to stay with them.

WOT !!!!

The publication said the remaining BT Italia business comprises four data centers and a backbone fiber network. TIM is reportedly seeking a payout of around €100 million ($110m) from BT in order to take on the assets

OFCOM are a Joke. living off tha hand that feeds them.

Ofcom, the UK's independent communications regulator, is primarily funded by fees and charges from the companies it regulates, including broadcasters, telecom providers.

OFCOM : A Parasite , that favour the other parasite that live of succeful companies.

Possibly seen the last of the 1.40 bottom.. with Barclays downgrade and the L.S.E taking advantage as usual to kick the feet from under it. The SP responds to it like Carney responds to Trump. "Up yours, were moving on".

As usual, The slightest negative reported with BT ( accurate or not) and the London Stock Exchange drop the price like a stone on opening. Then as most investors are like a flock of sheep, they run with that causing an increas in the drop. Then we struggle back up. Something fishy going on in the LSE that should be investigated.

Sorry, you will have to read it from the bottom up.

Kirkby’s policy is no small thing. As a supplier of domestic internet and mobile phone services, BT has been a longstanding advocate of working from home. As far back as 1999, BT was endorsing “teleworking” for its employees, and by 2014 about 10 per cent of its 120,000 employees worked remotely.

Needless to say, BT’s energetic and sociable boss works from a BT office five days a week. “I’m personally not very good at working from home,” she says. “I thrive on being around my colleagues, customers and people. That’s what gives me energy.”

One senior insider credited Kirkby with “scrapping and street fighting” for the business. Paolo Pescatore, the telecoms industry analyst, said: “Her understanding of the company, and the products and the divisions, is remarkable. She is so hands-on, and she is a force for good for that company.”

One of Kirkby’s key appointments to date has been Tom Meakin, a former senior partner at McKinsey who became BT’s first chief strategy and change officer. Harmeen Mehta, an outspoken chief digital and innovation officer, left at the same time. Jon James, from Danish telecoms provider Nuuday, has taken charge of the business division. And Claire Gillies, from Bell Canada, is replacing Marc Allera, who missed out on the top job to Kirkby, as boss of the consumer division.

Clearly, Kirkby can be ruthless where necessary. “I have to have the right people on the bus for the journey ahead for BT. And a number of my team have been around, you know, for quite some time.”

Kirkby also makes it clear she’s not afraid to have frank conversations with her staff. “I always have very honest, transparent conversations with all of my people,” she says.

Above much else, Kirkby wants to shape and change the “culture” of BT, a sprawling company with 30 major offices across the UK alone, from Salford and Stratford, to Inverness and Eniskillen in Northern Ireland.

Last month she changed BT’s work from home guidance — “three together, two wherever” — into policy, meaning office attendance is now strictly monitored and non-compliance can result in disciplinary action. “We weren’t hitting three days a week,” she explains. “We weren’t even hitting two days, really.”

Patterson’s replacement, the former Worldpay boss Philip Jansen, arrived with a stellar reputation but presided over a halving of the share price as investors balked at the level of investment needed — £15 billion — to replace the old copper-wired network with high-speed fibre optic cables.

When Kirkby took charge, BT’s share price was just over £1, having peaked close to £5 under Patterson. Since then, more cost-cutting and a raised dividend have taken shares back to £1.49.

Critics say Kirkby joined at a fortuitous moment — just as long-term infrastructure investments were paying off — and that the cuts had already been started by Jansen. But supporters say this understates the degree to which she has “rolled up her sleeves” and immersed herself in the business to find savings, saleable assets and areas in need of restructuring.

She trimmed BT’s workforce by 3 per cent to 117,000 in the nine months to the end of 2024. Asked if it was easy to find areas to cut, Kirkby says: “BT lives with almost 180 years of legacy platforms, products, services, and therefore has a huge amount of inefficiency and not always the best customer experience because of that legacy inefficiency.”

One of Kirkby’s senior employees described BT as “bloated”. She puts it in more diplomatic terms: “Our productivity is not where it should be relative to peers.”

Meanwhile, she has set out plans to “optimise’ BT’s global services division, which could lead to a sale. It has more than 1,000 corporate clients.

And it is understood that BT has started negotiations Warner Bros Discovery about selling its 50 per cent stake in TNT Sports, formerly known as BT Sport. The company sold the first 50 per cent, to make TNT a joint venture, in a 2022 deal that was worth up to £633 million.

Despite being hit with an estimated bill of £100 million from the autumn’s tax-heavy budget, Kirkby is less critical of Starmer’s regime than many other business leaders. “The government inherited a difficult situation,” she says. “They had to address the balance sheet they inherited.”

She adds: “They are on a marathon, not a sprint. A bit like myself at BT. You can’t turn around a company like BT, or a country like the UK, in a few months. And as long as … they deliver on their promises along the way, I think we’ll all feel good about it. And it’s exactly the same for me.”

Kirkby grew up in working-class Glasgow. She started her career straight from school as a trainee accountant in the Scotch whisky industry. She went on to land a job at consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble, where she worked for 20 years before entering the telecoms industry with Virgin Media.

Her first chief executive role was at Tele2, a Swedish telecoms challenger business. She later took charge of Stockholm’s state-backed Telia.

Her work in Sweden caught the eye of BT, where she became a non-executive director in 2019, before taking the top job five years later.

Kirkby took charge at a difficult moment. There had been some heady days in the mid-2010s, when Gavin Patterson launched BT Sport as a challenger to Sky and bought EE for £12.5 billion, but since then the company’s shares had been in decline.

Kirkby and Mittal are thought to have a good relationship and supporters of the chief executive frame his investment as an endorsement of her vision. But others speculate that he could ultimately represent a threat to her. “He’s not going to be a passive shareholder,” said one former executive. “He’ll want results quickly.” Kirkby says of Mittal: “He definitely will have a lot to add considering the business that he has built in India and internationally.”

To propel BT into the future, Kirkby will need help from Westminster. The chief executive has met both the prime minister Sir Keir Starmer and the chancellor Rachel Reeves in the past couple of weeks.

Top of her wish list for the new Labour government is planning reforms to make it easier for BT to build infrastructure for faster mobile reception and internet services. One of the measures it is pushing for is poles or masts of up to 20 metres to be exempt from planning permission.

Kirkby says she’s in “very good dialogue” with Labour but, perhaps hinting at some frustration, adds: “Clearly, we want to ensure that digital infrastructure planning red tape is getting the same priority as housebuilding, which they’ve been very vocal on so far.”

Key to Kirkby’s strategy has been a push for the BT Group to focus more of its attention on improving in the UK. “I want to get BT to be a national champion again, that everyone can be proud of: customers, the country and our owners,” she says. “We need to defend and retain our customers by delighting them more often.”

It has been a year of change at BT. Thousands have lost their jobs, senior executives have jumped or been pushed, non-core assets have been sold or put up for sale, and some imposing new investors have arrived on the shareholder register.

Top of the list is Sunil Bharti Mittal, a self-made billionaire known in his native India as the “telecoms tiger”. Mittal was in London last week to meet Kirkby and other BT executives, who presented him with their plans to overhaul a creaky telecoms behemoth. His company, Bharti Global, has a 24.5 per cent stake in BT, bought from Altice, controlled by the embattled French-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi, last November.

Allison Kirkby has established herself as a regular in the 15th floor canteen of One Braham, the modern, east London office block that serves as the headquarters of telecoms giant BT.

The chief executive’s favourite order? A bacon butty — white roll, butter, no ketchup — usually a reward for a Friday morning session in the gym.

“She’s in the canteen all the time,” says one staffer, no doubt deploying a touch of artistic licence. “She walks around the building talking to people. She very much wants to be seen and heard.”

It’s one year since Kirkby, 57, took on one of corporate Britain’s toughest gigs — a role that attracts close scrutiny from ministers, regulators, its 30 million customers, almost 120,000 employees, big shareholders and an army of retail investors who bought the stock when Margaret Thatcher’s government privatised British Telecom 40 years ago.

“Is everything going to plan?” muses Kirkby, as she reflects on her first year. “Well, first of all: I’m loving it — so that is going to plan.”