O2 now UKs largest telecom company
Now that O2 is owned by the Spanish operator Telefonica it has about 21m mobile phone subscribers as compared to BT which only has approximately 19.4m customers.
The news of the new rankings came as BT was forced to report a fall of 45pc in its pre-tax profits leaving their total at ?547m compared to the profits of Telefonica which are a much larger ?1.7 billion.
BT was forced to sell O2 in November of 2001 which was then known as BT Cellnet when profits started to collapse. In 2006 Telefonica purchased O2 for the record setting ?17.7 billion, which was the largest telecoms takeover in mobile history.
The chief executive of BT, Ian Livingston, seemed to regret selling O2 in comments that he made yesterday when he said that BT is pondering the best way to enter the mobile market once again when the Government finally auctions off mobile phone spectrum in the coming year.
According to Livingston, the proposals by the Government to give current operators the rights to the 2G licenses are a waste since a new auction is a best way give Government coffers a boost.
Analyst Lawrence Sugarman of ING stated that the comments show that BT?s revenues need to be increased and that the company is clearly looking at all possibilities for moving forward after they chose to leave the mobile market too early.
In just this year alone O2 has increased its mobile subscribers by about one million even though the other four major operators in the UK were only able to add 400,000 subscribers collectively.
