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People bleating on about AI clearly don't understand the minuscule role of it in Ocado.

The robots are the innovation here. A basic machine learning algorithm to predict what a customer will buy next is nothing special.

Thanks Fleccy, looks like my searching in the document was too lazy. :-|

£449 is very little which puts paid to any theories that BT will rake it in by selling their vacated property. So the savings will mostly be on rent/short leases.

Probably but also it doesn't matter long term I don't think. At this point I lose track of Ocado's losses. All I know is there was that one year they made profit that everyone remembers.

Thanks, that's a really useful link.

"As part of a wider property outsourcing arrangement, in December 2001, we completed the sale and leaseback of

the majority of our UK property portfolio to Telereal, a 50/50 joint venture partnership between Land Securities Trillium

and The William Pears Group, for £2.4 billion in cash. Around 6,700 properties – ofÆces, telephone exchanges,

vehicle depots, warehouses, call centres and computer centres, totalling some 5.5 million square metres – were

effectively sold."

and later:

"We have retained direct ownership of approximately 220 properties. A number of these were retained with a view to obtaining better value through other means."

Fast forwarding to 2023 the annual report says that "Property, plant and equipment" is worth £21B but does not break down how much of that is property and indeed how much value will be brought in by that which is being sold. This is what I would really love to know.

I've googled the heck out of this but am still unclear on whether BT owns its exchanges or not. I found this article from the Guardian in 2001 that says they sold them to Telereal to get cash quickly, and then leased back the properties:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2001/jun/13/bt.citynews

Presumably they pay rent effectively or maybe they bought short term leases to save them money?

Does anyone know the timeline for the company being wound up?

Thanks for the post Larry, that is much less money tied up in property than I expected.

Maybe the rest is in the copper? :-)

How did Kirkby fare in her previous jobs? Good article here:

https://www.telecomtv.com/content/access-evolution/as-she-heads-to-bt-allison-kirkby-leaves-telia-in-decent-shape-49493/

Basically Telia's share price decreased 20% during her tenure although looks like Telia had a lot of debt (sound familiar?) and invested in 5G on her watch.

Telia's dividend yield is about 8% to BT's 7%.

Lots of similarities between the 2 companies.

Anyone who puts a post on here purely with a prediction and no useful information gets filtered by me. There are rather a lot of them now.

Selling such an icon of BT and also selling property in central London smacks of short termism. Surely they could have redeveloped it themselves, thus keeping the landmark part of BT?

Labour is throwing bugger all at public services. At this stage they are a slightly more competent version of the tories.

And the share price does nothing!

Based on nothing because there is no reason for this to happen while Kroger is in the game IMO.

Interesting given the ITEP programme is now in jeopardy.

Another share I'm watching has great potential but the price drops day-on-day. That particular share has an extremely low daily volume of shares traded which implies that the price does not accurately reflect the company. People are holding because they think the share has a future, but the magic of AT trades means it drops down bit by bit.

Could the same be happening to BT?

Wonder if we'll hit the magic 98 from September 2020.

That's a good point. What is the boss's vision for the company? She seems to have had a very low profile so far.

You would design the parts completely differently for injection moulding which is isotropic whereas you have to be careful about lining up the axes of strength of 3D printed parts. That said, Ocado can probably get away with slow/expensive 3D printing as they aren't actually doing mass production and the value is in the IP and software more than anything.

I watched that trade show video and was expecting something new. Nothing impressive there. Same old tech except for 3D printed parts which would have been lighter, stronger and cheaper if produced using injection moulding. I suppose if you shout "AI" and "3D printing" enough the money comes your way!

I'm still on the fence at this price. I think it's too high for getting in and the general food delivery market is very unexciting right low as illustrated by the Christmas sales.

I don't get this obsesssion of late with low interest rates.

Interest rates were well over 5% for decades.

Inflation is a poor measure and should include house prices - if it did, interest rates would definitely be up.