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Personnel Today

Sector Watch Telecoms

by Personnel Today 16 Jul 2002
by Personnel Today 16 Jul 2002

Our series analysing the HR challenges looks at the telecoms industry and
the impact of rapid change, new technology and the need to cut costs

Industry audit

The UK telecoms market is split into two sectors: fixed line and mobile

Fixed line

As the fixed-line market has been opened up to greater competition, volumes
for individual operators have been squeezed. According to industry watchdog
Oftel, at the end of last year there were 320,000 cable, modem and DSL (fast
internet connection subscribers).

BT has a turnover of £18.45bn and holds 69 per cent of overall fixed line
retail revenues in the UK, with 45 per cent of the international calls market
and 88 per cent of the line rental market.

Other key players include:

– Cable & Wireless (turnover £5.9bn)

– Kingston Communications (turnover £316.3m)

– ntl (turnover £2.5bn)

– Telewest (turnover £1.32bn)

Colt Telecom (turnover £901.9m)

Mobile

In the mobiles market, at the end of 2001 there were 45 million mobile phone
subscribers, 69 per cent of whom bought pre-pay packages, with growth running
at 12 per cent – down (how much?) on the year before.

Market leaders are:

– Orange (part of France Telecom, turnover  15.09bn euros (£9.79bn))

– Nokia (turnover £31.2bn)

– One to One (part of T-Mobile, turnover 48.3bn euros (£31.3bn))

– BT Cellnet (part of mmO2, turnover £4.28bn)

– Vodafone (turnover £22.85bn)

– Number of people employed worldwide: more than 1.3 million (source:
Idate).

– Average industry staff turnover: 7 to 12 per cent.

HR positives: A fast-moving industry, access to some of the best HR
technology around, an ability to make a real difference to a business, and the
challenge of managing an industry in flux

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HR negatives: An increasingly global business means a lot of travel,
dealing with overseas staff and time differences and the pressure of managing
change in a severe downturn

For case studies go to

Personnel Today

Personnel Today articles are written by an expert team of award-winning journalists who have been covering HR and L&D for many years. Some of our content is attributed to "Personnel Today" for a number of reasons, including: when numerous authors are associated with writing or editing a piece; or when the author is unknown (particularly for older articles).

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