UK telco group BT is reportedly flogging £100 million of infrastructure assets in The Netherlands as its new CEO strives to make it a leaner operation.

Scott Bicheno

August 19, 2019

1 Min Read
BT streamlining continues with reported £100m Dutch infrastructure sale

UK telco group BT is reportedly flogging £100 million of infrastructure assets in The Netherlands as its new CEO strives to make it a leaner operation.

BT doesn’t seem to have said anything official yet, but the Sunday Times got the scoop regardless. Apparently this is part of an attempt to streamline the struggling Global Services business, as BT currently uses its own infrastructure, such as towers and cables, to connect its Dutch business customers.

There’s not much more to the report other than a claim that, while BT is also looking to streamline its Global Services operations in other regions, including Ireland, Spain and Latin America, it doesn’t plan to completely abandon specific countries.

The report also refers to a previous Sunday Times scoop that BT is also flogging a legal software service called Tikit. It’s reasonable to ask what the hell BT was doing in the legal software business in the first place and if this is indicative of the kind of wild tangents the Global Services business has gone off on in the past, we can expect many more such disposals.

This news comes just days after it was revealed that BT was forced to hand over a bunch of cash to Ofcom due to its historical accounting incompetence. In addition BT announced last week that it was delisting from the New York stock exchange and earlier in the month decided to flog BT Fleet Solutions. Sadly for CEO Philip Jansen, none of this tweaking seems to have won over investors, with BT’s share price down by over 30% since he took over at the start of the year.

About the Author(s)

Scott Bicheno

As the Editorial Director of Telecoms.com, Scott oversees all editorial activity on the site and also manages the Telecoms.com Intelligence arm, which focuses on analysis and bespoke content.
Scott has been covering the mobile phone and broader technology industries for over ten years. Prior to Telecoms.com Scott was the primary smartphone specialist at industry analyst Strategy Analytics’. Before that Scott was a technology journalist, covering the PC and telecoms sectors from a business perspective.
Follow him @scottbicheno

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