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Company Brief
BT Group
Copyright 2020, Faulkner Information Services. All
Rights Reserved.
Docid: 00014765
Publication Date: 2009
Report Type: VENDOR
Preview
BT Group is the number one telecommunications service provider in the UK,
serving more than 6,500 corporate and public sector customers, as well as
1,400 communication provider customers. BT also competes throughout
Europe, the Americas, and the Asia Pacific region with other major
multinational carriers. In 2020, BT Group appointed Rob Shuter as
CEO of its Enterprise unit and as a member of BT’s Executive Committee, as
well as launched Small Business Support Scheme, which includes a series of
measures aimed at boosting connectivity, cashflow, and confidence for
small businesses in the wake of Covid-19 and Brexit.
Report Contents:
Fast Facts
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Name: BT Group
Headquarters
BT Centre
81 Newgate Street
London EC1A 7AJ
United Kingdom
Tel: 44-20-7356-5000
Fax: 44-20-7356-5520
Web: http://www.bt.com/
Type of Vendor: Communications solutions and services
provider
Founded: 1984
Service Areas: UK and more than 170 countries worldwide
Stock Symbol: BT
History
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BT Group, the former government-owned postal, telegram, and telephone
(PTT) monopoly, is the largest communications service provider in the
United Kingdom. BT provides services to residential and business customers
across the UK and in Europe, the Americas, and the Asia-Pacific region.
The company has more than 18 million customers, serviced by four business
units – BT Retail, BT Wholesale, Openreach, and BT Global Services. Global
Services has customers in more than 170 countries worldwide. BT provides a
wide range of services that include voice telephony, data services,
Internet access and transport, and subscription TV.
As the world’s oldest communications company, BT can trace its roots back
to The Electric Telegraph Company established in 1846 and more immediately
to the Post Office Act of 1969, under which the Post Office ceased being a
government department and became instead a public corporation, with the
exclusive privilege of running telecommunications.
BT was established in 1980 when Post Office Telecommunications was
renamed British Telecom, but remained part of the Post Office. The
following year, the British Telecommunications Act of 1981 created two
separate corporations: Post Office and British Telecom. Then in 1984,
British Telecom went public in one of the largest UK IPOs in history. It
wasn’t until 1991 that the company changed its names to BT. Two years
later, the British government sold almost all of its remaining shares in
BT for $7.4 billion. The following year, it launched Concert
Communications Services, a $1 billion joint venture company, with MCI,
giving the companies a global network; Concert was the first company to
provide a single-source broad portfolio of global communications services
for multinational customers.
In 1996, BT announced the creation of a global telecommunications company
called Concert plc, to be incorporated in the UK, with headquarters in both
London and Washington, DC; as part of the alliance, BT acquired a 20%
holding in MCI; sold its stake in MCI to WorldCom for $7 billion for a
profit of more than $2 billion on BT’s original investment in MCI. Two years
later is announced another global venture also called Concert, with the
formation of a equally owned joint venture with AT&T to provide services
to multinational companies, including international calling.
In 2001, BT divested Yell Group, its directory publishing division, and
demerged O2, its wireless division; Yell was sold to a company jointly
owned by Apax Partners and Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst for 2.04 billion
pounds in cash and 100 million pounds in interest-bearing vendor loan
notes; issued 1.98 billion new shares in May 2001 during the largest
rights offering in UK history.The following year it dissolved Concert due
to falling prices for international services, overcapacity in the
long-haul transportation market, financial troubles experienced by many of
the telecom carriers that were supposed to be Concert customers, and a
corporate culture clash between executives appointed by BT and AT&T;
agreed to end the Canadian joint venture with AT&T; AT&T agreed to
purchase BT’s 9% stake in AT&T Canada and take over the venture’s
obligation to acquire the 70 percent of AT&T Canada that it did not
already own.
2004 saw the introduction of Consult 21, an industry consultation for
BT’s 21st Century Network (21CN) program that began deployment of an
all-IP network to deliver converged multimedia communications. The next
year, BT completed the acquisition of Infonet Services, giving it its
first access to the US market since the dissolution of the Concert joint
venture; acquired the second largest telecoms operator in the Italian
business market, Albacom; acquired the leading financial services extranet
provider Radianz from Reuters. In 2007, it reported that it would acquire
Comsat International for £100 million to extend its reach in Latin
America. It created two new units in 2006 focused on IT service creation
and delivery: BT Design and BT Operate; cut Wi-Fi rates by up to 50
percent and added more than 2,500 European hotspots, bringing the total to
50,000 non-UK and more than 100,000 UK and Ireland hotspot locations;
signed an agreement between its digital TV service, BT Vision, and
Twentieth Century Fox; announced that BT Americas CEO Michael Boustridge
will also lead BT’s Asia Pacific operations; replaced Francois Barrault,
the head of BT Global Services, with the BT finance director, Hanif
Lalani.
In 2009, it launched its Intelligent Virtual Private Network (iVPN)
service in 172 countries, powered by BT’s 21st Century Network (21CN)
software-driven global platform; announced a new relationship with
Starbucks Coffee Company to provide Wi-Fi across more than 650 Starbucks
coffeehouses in the UK and Ireland, as well as in more than 50,000 sites
overseas through agreements with other global network operators; launched
the UK’s cheapest home and mobile broadband package; planned to cut 15,000
jobs and move more workers to part-time status; restructured BT Global
Services. In 2014, BT entered talks to buy EE to increase its bundled
service offerings. The following year, the Competition and Markets
Authority approved BT’s £12.5B acquisition of EE. It teamed with Huawei on
5G research in 2016, and in 2017, BT teamed with Amazon Web Services to
launch a “hybrid cloud landing zone” and expand research and innovation
for security in the cloud. In 2018, BT launched direct connectivity to
Google Cloud and expanded its alliance with Sky. In 2020, BT Group
appointed Rob Shuter as CEO of its Enterprise unit and as a member of BT’s
Executive Committee, as well as launched Small Business Support Scheme,
which includes a series of measures aimed at boosting connectivity,
cashflow, and confidence for small businesses in the wake of Covid-19 and
Brexit.
Key Executives
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- Jan du Plessis – Chairman
- Philip Jansen – Chief Executive
- Simon Lowth – Group Chief Financial Officer
Major Products
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BT offers IT, telecommunications, broadband, and Internet products and
services. Table 1 provides a list of business products and services
available from BT.
| Product/Service | Description | Competitors |
|---|---|---|
| Small and Medium Business Products | BT offers the following for UK-based companies with up to 500 employees:
|
AT&T Cable & Wireless Deutsche Telekom T-Systems Telefonica O2 |
| Large Business and Public Sector Products and Services |
BT offers the following for large organizations in the UK and
|
AT&T |
BT’s personal products and services for in the home and on the go are
listed in Table 2.
| Product/Service | Description | Competitors |
|---|---|---|
| Broadband | BT offers several Internet and Broadband options:
|
Sky TalkTalk Telefonica O2 Virgin Media |
| Phone | BT offers several calling plans:
|
Sky TalkTalk Telefonica O2 Virgin Media |
|
TV |
BT Vision offers the following features, using the Vision+ Box:
|
Sky |
| Packages | BT offers various bundled packages of services, such as:
|
Sky TalkTalk Telefonica O2 Virgin Media |
Major Competitors
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- AT&T: http://www.att.com/
- Cable & Wireless: http://www.cw.com/
- Deutsche Telekom T-Systems: http://www.t-systems.co.uk/
- TalkTalk: http://www.talktalk.co.uk/
- Telefonica O2: http://www.o2.co.uk/
- Virgin Media: http://www.virginmedia.com/
Recent Activity
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In September 2020, BT launched a new multi billion pound advertising
campaign focusing on boosting its broadband business. In July, BT Group
appointed Rob Shuter as CEO of its Enterprise unit and as a member of BT’s
Executive Committee. He is the former CEO of MTN Group, the African mobile
telecommunications company. In July, BT launched BT Halo for business, a
converged fiber broadband, mobile and digital phone line bundle for
micro-businesses, which represent 91 percent of businesses in the UK. It
also launched Small Business Support Scheme, which includes a series of
measures aimed at boosting connectivity, cashflow, and confidence for
small businesses in the wake of Covid-19 and Brexit. In January 2020, BT
reported that it is now answering all of its customer service calls in the
UK and Ireland.
About the Author
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Sherry Kercher is an editor for Faulkner Information
Services. She holds a master’s degree in library and information science,
and tracks and writes about storage, communication networks and equipment,
and Internet technologies.
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