Telecoms move for Consignia

COMPANIES & FINANCE: Telecoms move for Consignia

Financial Times, Oct 13, 2001
By KEVIN BROWN and GAUTAM MALKANI

Consignia, the government-owned group which runs the Royal Mail, is to use the Post Office to sell telecommunications services nearly 20 years after it was split from British Telecommunications.

From next week, post offices around the UK will offer self-branded, pre-pay cards giving customers access to a leased network run by Tele2, the Swedish pan-European telecoms operator.

The move represents an effort by Consignia to expand its revenue base, which has been hit by the proliferation of e-mail and the growth of private postal companies.

For Tele2, which has 12m customers across Europe but a low profile in the UK, the partnership will allow it to enter the market with a well-known brand.

Customers buying the cards will dial a prefix before making normal telephone calls and gain access to Tele2’s cheaper, leased network.

In other European countries such as France, Italy and Germany, Tele2 also runs a fixed-line operation with a pre-programmed telephone to encourage greater loyalty than pre-pay cards. In Scandinavia it also runs mobile services and a virtual mobile network in Denmark and the Netherlands. Such measures, if introduced in the UK, would mark a return to fully-fledged telecoms services for the Post Office since BT was split from the GPO ahead of privatisation in 1984. Additional reporting by Kevin Brown. Copyright: The Financial Times Limited