Phones4U used to own one of the billing providers for Vodaphone and O2 in singlepoint, but sold it to Voda themselves. This allowed them to sell there own tariffs, this gave them an edge over people like CPW, and also meant there tariffs looked better than Voda themselves, selling singlepoint took the competitive edge off them.
What a crappy deal...
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Ok, I'm done now.
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That might actually be a ram.
I just pity the staff all losing their jobs.
3 times I've worked for companies who've either gone bust,administration or cease trading.
They'll get redundancy but it depends how long they've been there.
No income and rents/mortgages/bills to pay is the worst possible scenario.
Lets hope they get jobs soon.
Poor buggers.
I've worked for companies who've either gone bust,administration or cease trading.
woolies and habitat here!
Very weak business model being solely dependant on one or two massive [s]customers[/s] suppliers with no long term contract in place though.....
fixed that..
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.
This happened in so many markets, over so many years. One that jumps to mind is PCs / computers - one of the reason you don't pick up a PC magazine (do they still exist?) and find hundreds of adverts from one-man-and-his-dog PC builders like you did in the early '90s is that they could no longer get hold of the latest motherboards and processors in sufficient quantity / timeliness / price to be able to compete. Intel locked down their supply channel to the big boys only, and the little guys either had to get hold of stuff "grey" or use older stuff. Or close, which they all did.
Nephew and partner both worked there, both loved it, apparently staff were rewarded well for hard work (sales) Shame they moved into a new house literally weeks ago and have just come back from Rome on holiday 🙁 Good luck to anyone on here hit by this...
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 had a '4' in their name. They could have only surpassed this if they were called Phonez4u. On that basis alone they deserved to die.
Or maybe I'm being a little bit harsh. But then I also hate high street shopping, shopping centres and this materialist fascination with gadgets which P4U epitomises.
Someone just told me last year they had £1 billion in revenues (£100m profits), scary how a company can just sink so quickly, business case study in being over exposed.
I wonder if they can just re-brand as a massive franchise for one of the mobile providers, it would seem they have store locations and trained staff ready to go.
Not great for local rental markets, lost of empty shops and lost business rate income too for local authorities.
Bought for £600m in borrrowed cash, £200m profits in the last couple of years whilst not building a sustainable business. Bust now, staff lose out, investor pensions funds lose out, buyers lose out on choice, champers for the equity partner.
ta daaa!
they haven't gone "bust" as such, just been put in administration as they can no longer supply mobile phone contracts.
"A good company making profits of over £100m, employing thousands of decent people has been forced into administration," he added.
I wonder if they can just re-brand as a massive franchise for one of the mobile providers
Vodafones4U?
Oh, wait...
I doubt if a rebrand as a franchise is possible. There are two EE stores in my small town, hangovers from when Orange and T-mobile were seperate entities. Once the leases expire in similar circumstances there will no doubt be further contraction from the high street to online.
The move to 24 month contracts must have hurt them too
That's becoming more prevalent though, throughout the industry.
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.
they haven't gone "bust" as such, just been put in administration as they can no longer supply mobile phone contracts.
@Klunk IMO they are most definitely bust. £600m of debt and when the contracts run out next year no revenue to pay the debt, hence they have gone into administration. I would expect they have pretty much zero assets. They are foo-bared.
Chippenham has (had) a P4U, CPW, Three, EE, O2, Vodaphone, a Tesco, and some other third-party phone dealer, all within two or three minutes walk of each other.
Sadly inevitable that Darwinism is going to start culling the weaker ones.
Had they not been loaded up with so much debt, they could have kept trading.....
What would they be trading? Virgin mobile contracts & phone cases?
