Gossip

Vodafone: how to hide from the asset-strippers

by Sniffer | posted on 30 May 2006

Congratulations to Vodafone's Board for a good PR spin campaign! Everybody seems to have been so relieved to find that the loss is "only" twenty-odd billion, that they seem to have decided not to ask some hard questions. Questions like:

Now that you've agreed that all your holdings are over-valued, why should we believe your Verizon holdings aren't equally inflated?

If your various holdings aren't inflated, are you sure that Vodafone itself isn't inflated? and if so

why should Vodafone not be worth more split up and sold off, than as a giant corporation?

And what about these oursourcing announcements which are being sold to us as "job cuts" when they aren't? Why would they actually work? Has any mobile company found such oursourcing deals to reduce costs? And even if they do cut costs, what's the impact on revenue - just how bad can outsourcing deals get?

Finally, does Vodafone really know where it's going? What about all the voice-minutes that going 3G was going to create last time we heard "visions" of the future? What happened to the dream of getting massive revenue from business data users? How about mobile email - no, not Blackberry email, which makes RIM rich, but non-Blackberry email?

Your friend the Hunky Mouse suggests that these questions haven't gone away. A short holiday, maybe, while the purse-holders count their new cash... and then come September, they're going to get asked again.

It only takes one cockup of the "Whose job is it to order bog-roll for the Boardroom?" variety, and the whole job-cut saving scam will become one of those "Whose stupid idea was that!" scandals...

Tags: Vodafone, mobile, cellphone, and Arun Sarin