As others have mentioned “crapphone whorehouse” saw the writing on the wall and jumped into bed with Dixons/PCW, accessing the telecoms marker in a different way, one that still has some life in it, Phones 4U didn’t and are now done.
CPW was always a retail business. Just think of the BestBuy deal. Might not have worked out in the UK, but it still netted £850m profit when the CPW share was sold back to BestBuy in the US. There’s a reason why Dunstone has so many millionaires working for him….
Dixons have struggled in their market – look at the other big box stores – and so between them becoming the dominant face of gadget retial is key. As much as the MNOs hate Dunstone, they know he has the pocket of an awful lot of customers.
But P4U was adrift after the sale of Caudwell Communications – its spent nearly 10 years in various private equity hands and the business model hasn;t moved forward enough in the face of MNOs desperately trying to protect their margins in the face the pace of data usage and the network investment required. Just like BT, they don’t like the market eating their lunch….
I thought they missed a trick when initially people like Virgin, then Tesco etc, bought a shed load of minutes in bulk off of the big suppliers and resold them themselves – instead they continued to offer a service that got replaced by the internet.
They did, but Tesco (like TalkTalk, Virgin, GiffGaff, Lyca etc) is an MVNO and has a different business model. No MNO would ever have let a distribution channel become and MVNO and compete with them directly. The minute they tried to do that, it would have been game over anyway. And, unlike the others, P4U didn’t have any customers of its own – it just connected people to become customers of the MNOs.