The demerger of Carphone Warehouse’s Talk Talk broadband operations, to create a £1.5bn company headquartered in Irlam, is great news for the telecoms sector in the north west, its new chairman said today.
Neil McArthur said the group’s plan to create 50 new jobs in its Salford processing centre was a “conservative” estimate, with real numbers likely to be considerably higher.
He said the demerger was conceived largely to create clear water between a retail business and “a technology business that has grown out of it”, and was not a prelude to Talk Talk being sold to anyone else.
Although the final decision on whether to sell would remain with Charles Dunstone and David Ross, who remain majority shareholders of both demerged groups, he said Talk Talk was committed to the north west, where it has 2,000 staff.
“We have only recently built a purpose-built engineering site in Irlam,” he said, “and we are not moving anywhere.”
He was not troubled by BT’s planned roll-out of its Superfast broadband network which uses optical fibres. Some analysts have suggested this could pose a threat to Talk Talk, which has relied heavily on spare capacity on the copper wire landline network in the past.
But McArthur said: “We already offer up to 24Mb, and BT is only rolling Superfast broadband out to 40 per cent of the country, and only offering it to 20 per cent of that 40 per cent. In any case we can buy some of that capacity on the wholesale market.”
He is much more interested in Project Canvas, the joint venture his company has launched with the BBC, ITV and BT to provide a version of Freeview for internet TV.
Carphone Warehouse’s share price was hit 18 months ago when David Ross was accused of breaking stock exchange rules by using his stake as security for a loan without the board’s knowledge.
McArthur said the new company had governance policies in place to prevent anything similar happening again.
