As promised last week (see BT Q2: work to do on services orders), we have penned some further comments prompted by BT’s Q2 results, following discussions with the company’s Global Services division. These are available to TechMarketView subscribers as a UKHotViewsExtra piece titled BT Global Services: some light from the high street.
In addition, a couple of points from last week’s commentary are worthy of clarification. Firstly, we highlighted BT’s strong performance in broadband. The figures of “166k new customer lines” with a “63% market share of new lines” refer, as we intended, only to sales by BT Retail, rather than the provision of wholesale lines to other providers, which also naturally is a major activity for BT. The point is that BT in Q2 won more than its fair share of broadband customer accounts – a good performance.
Secondly, as we noted, this was BT Global Services’ lowest quarterly tally of services orders since April-June 2009. As CEO Ian Livingston admitted, it was “probably £100m, maybe a bit more than that, less than we expected”. However, it’s worth highlighting that the eye-catching year-on-year drop of 34% in service orders was impacted by the hefty slice of renewal business signed with the MoD in the prior year (see BT signs £640m DFTS extension with MoD).