3 aims to double it’s customer base
By Ben Robinson on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 12:42 PM PST In Financial/Corporate News, Three
3 is apparently aiming to double it’s customer base to nearly 7m by 2012. Kevin Russell recently spoke to the Financial Times and laid down the gauntlet with this challenging stat.
Russell has apparently spent his first year cutting costs, and it now looking to boost profits – and a good part of that is adding customers. Interestingly, the latest data on 3UK shows 3.4m active customers and £1.6bn of revenue (in 2007).
In the last year Mr Russell signed an agreement with T-Mobile (NYSE: DT) for network sharing, meaning reduced CAPEX and OPEX. Additionally, he also added more high street shops – meaning more direct recruitment of customers, which is cheaper.
Well, I’m all for 3 growing their customer base – but it’s a slight puzzler as to where it’s going to come from – the UK is pretty saturated at the moment, and the likes of Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) and O2 (NYSE: TEF) have significant chunks of the mobile-wielding population. The next few years will continue to make for interesting times as the Operators come with ever more innovative ways to lure punters to their networks…
[Via: FT.com]
3′ll get the customers by out-innovating every single other operator in the UK. It’s doing well at the moment, but it is banking on the mobile web becoming a massive crowd puller before the other operators get their houses in order in terms of price and marketing.