Thursday 31 January 2008

Vodafone Q3 results

The company today announced their quarterly results for the 3 months ending 31st December. On the face of it this looks like good news for the company, and for workers who should expect to benefit from the success generated by their hard work.

Total revenue is up 15.8% to £9.2 billion and the company now has 250 million customers worldwide.

Vodafone UK took £1.2 Billion from 18.4 million customers in the 3 months, that’s up 5.9% on the same period last year.

So why the gloomy message today from UK CEO Nick Read, talking of recession in the USA and a slowdown in the UK? It would appear the Nick is very selective about the commentary that he reads as the consensus is that these are far from certain. The results prove that he is running a very successful operation and the hard work of his staff is paying off.

The message goes on to talk of “cost reduction”, making “key deals” and “simplifying the business”. Connect members fully support initiatives that benefit both the company’s bottom line and the environment. The company has made good progress in these areas and we would be interested to know if Nick has picked up his Toyota Prius.

But this seems to be a message aimed at softening workers up for yet more outsourcing, offshoring and redundancies.

We have already seen in the last few months that marketing has been moved to Ireland, Regional Ops is in the process of a cut and shut with Orange and parts of Network operation and development are been outsourced to Alcatel-Lucent.

If Nick isn’t careful his organisation will be very simple, as he will be the only person left on the payroll.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Since Nick drives a McLaren SLR I highly doubt he'll be switching to a prius any time soon!

This is despite him not delivering on promises he made at roadshows 2 years ago about taking back the UK marketplace and fighting competitors on prices and services

Anonymous said...

Hmmm, difference of interpretation...

According to LONDON (Reuters) -

"Mobile phone giant Vodafone Group said on Thursday it had seen no tangible sign of an economic slowdown across its global businesses and reiterated that it believed it was resilient to any recession."

"We've seen very strong results in the U.S. and the U.S. is supposed to be leading the parade, as it were, on where the economies might head," Chief Executive Arun Sarin told a conference call"