Carphone Warehouse taking cautious outlook
Thursday 31 July 2008 15:23:53 by John Hunt
The first quarter results for Carphone Warehouse have also been released today, and they are announcing a cautious outlook, with expectations lower than originally anticipated. This quarter saw the TalkTalk brand gain a net 86,000 customers, but this fell to 41,000 when combined with AOL, leading to an expected growth of only 200,000 to 250,000 this year, down from original forecasts of 400,000. The AOL brand saw a drop of 45,000 customers, blamed on lack of customer recruitment whilst the migration from the AOL to TalkTalk platform takes place, and also due to 12,000 customers who were unable to migrate. Overall broadband customers are now at 2.8 million.
Carphone Warehouse have reported that customer churn is falling, and growth in broadband penetration is slowing, so they plan to increase focus on growing the average revenue per user (ARPU), which currently stands at £22.10 for broadband customers, up from £21.20 in 2007, by provision of value-added services. There has been a big change on the network side of things since 2007 when 966,000 of 2.4 million customers were unbundled. In 2008 this has grown to 1.9 million of the 2.7 million customers, a change from 40% to 70% of total customers being unbundled. The full details can be found on the Carphone Warehouse Group website.
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yes, all pointless stats!! people are staying due to the bad managment of BB, mis-sold into a contract lock-in, prefer cheap phones and only want basic web, sick of BT not caring..
And yes, BT does not care about retention, only itself!
A friend of mine was 'caught' by TT's relentless marketing, so I tried BT CS to try to get the line back (it was only a few days later, so well within the changeover time)
After an hour or two of being passed around by idiots, people trying to sell BT ISP, that she could not afford, and them disbelieving it is not the cheapest...
yes, BT may LOOK cheap, but after 3 months it doubles in price!! check here for how much more you can get, and READ THE SMALL PRINT!!!
http://www.top10-broadband.co.uk/packages/
but back to BT hopelessness... eventually after spending most of the day and many numbers, I thought I had found someone that said he would make sure the line went back to BT...
of course the changover time came, no sign of BT.. still idiots at CS...
The only good news, is that nothing bad happend with TT, good 'net, good phone service.. the TT forum is better than phone CS - better than witing on the phone!
c_j_ - bandwidth excess charges, ofc
"they plan to increase focus on growing the average revenue per user (ARPU), which currently stands at £22.10 for broadband customers"
They can get knotted!, I'm happy sticking with my combined bill averaging £17.54 per month. If they want more, I want more back in return!.
BT price increasing?
Like AoL - Just £9.99 /mth for 3 months
£19.99 /mth thereafter.
Like CarphoneWarehouse - £9.99 for 3 months
(£19.99 thereafter)
It appears that 35% of the broadband market have to be into sadomasicism.
Dawn_Falcon - you might have a point, *except* that any such usage based charging would surely constitute a big enough change to Ts+Cs to constitute an opportunity to "get out for free". Or maybe not, given that section 6.3 of their 26page Ts+Cs already says "we may at any time and at our sole discretion amend a fixed data transfer limit" (etc). It's 40GB currently and they say "we will endeavour to act reasonably". Well of course.
How much is broadband migration these days (LLU->LLU or LLU->IPstream)? How much is voice line migration (LLU->BT)?
CPW are already trialing a potential moneyspinner with their members forum. Can easily see it morphing into a "premium" support add-on once it loses its beta tag.
Those that won't pay put up with the standard non-existant phone support.
c_j_ - interesting. Most ISP's reserve the right to charge for "abusive" uses of bandwidth at the least which can rapidly morph intoo bandwidth overage charges.
Their figures are also down because the Carphone Warehouse / AOL have such bad customer service.
Also TT / CPW have been signing up customers without them even requesting it; OFCOM were not impressed; lastly bad press is bad press & it sticks; when will companies learn that that best recommendation they can get is word of mouth.
How are they going to increase ARPU via "value added services" when their business model is specifically designed to attract people looking for "cheap" ? Consequently their customer base is folk who are unlikely to pay extra for "added value"?
Churn is falling because of long contracts and multi-service "lock in", not because of happy punters. AG's "Rate Your ISP" shows CPW's results as barely above Tiscali's.
Cheap services are often worth every penny.