Global disservices
The extent to which BT's global services division drags the whole company into the red grows with every quarter.
In its latest quarterly earnings report, BT announced it was taking charges of £1.3 billion on the division, apparently as a result of seriously over-estimating the amount of money it would make from its services contracts. It's also managed to move its pension pot from a pre tax surplus of £2.8 bn a year ago to a deficit of £4 bn.
All this has resulted in a quarterly loss of £1.279 bn and an annual loss of £134 m. As a consequence, BT has vowed to repeat the 15,000 redundancies it managed last year. BT employees must be hoping it treats them the same was it did the boss of the chronically mismanaged Global Services division when he was sacked last year.
"Three out of four of BT's lines of business have performed well in spite of fierce competition and the global economic downturn," said chief exec Ian Livingston. "However this achievement has been overshadowed by the unacceptable performance of BT Global Services and the resulting charges we have taken."
There was some potential good news for UK broadband, however. "We will examine doubling the pace of the roll out of super fast broadband next year within existing capital expenditure plans, bringing fibre based services within the reach of more than a million homes and businesses and securing the jobs of a thousand BT people," said Livingstone.