BT names new Business CEO as revenues dipBT names new Business CEO as revenues dip

The executive reshuffle means that former BT Business CEO Bas Burger will focus all his energies on selling off the UK incumbent's international operations as it furthers plans to retrench to its home market.

Jon James will take up his new role as head of BT Business in March, joining the telco from Danish operator Nuuday, where he has served as CEO for the past three-plus years. James said he is "excited" about joining BT. "I am looking forward to working with Allison, Bas and the BT Business team as we build an even stronger asset for our customers, our shareholders and for the UK," he said.

That's a pretty standard canned comment that arguably does not fully reflect the extent of the challenge James will face.

BT Business posted a 2% revenue slide to £1.98 billion in the three months to the end of December and a 5% decline for the first nine months of the financial year.

The telco insists that business revenues were "stable" in its core UK channels, suggesting that it is still the operations that once came under the Global Services umbrella dragging down its performance. However, it has not shared the relevant data to back up that point. It did highlight its recent £1.3 billion contract with the Home Office to provide mobile services for the Emergency Services Network though, which is clearly supposed to serve as proof that things are going OK in the UK.

Those pesky overseas operations will be Burger's problem to solve, once James lands in the CEO chair.

"This appointment enables Bas Burger to dedicate his time to the optimisation of our international business segment, which is progressing to plan," BT's group CEO Allison Kirkby

Essentially, that means a sell-off, as BT intimated last year when Kirkby shared her plans for the company, including a narrowing of focus on the UK. Doubtless we will have more information on Burger's progress on that front in the fullness of time.

Kirkby has presided over largely positive results announcements at BT since she took the reins a year ago, but Q3 feels little different. Despite her best efforts to highlight the positives – although, again we're lacking hard data in some areas – the market did not react particularly well to this set of quarterlies.

BT's shares dropped by 4% first thing on Thursday. They were heading in the right direction again by the time of writing, but were still some way off their previous close.

At group level, revenues were down 3% year-on-year to £5.2 billion due to the aforementioned issue with BT Business, apparently outside of the UK, and weaker handset sales at the telco's Consumer unit.

BT Consumer posted a 2% revenue slide to £2.5 billion as a result, but the company noted that service revenue grew by 0.4% on-year, reversing a 1.3% decline in the first half of the year.

BT talked up expansion in its full fibre and 5G customer bases, but did not share details. However, overall its mobile postpaid customer base declined by 4,000 during the quarter and it shed 40,000 consumer broadband accounts.

On a brighter note, Openreach's fibre rollout is still going well.

"Openreach again performed strongly with the highest ever full fibre build, passing more than 1 million premises for the fourth consecutive quarter, and connecting a new record of nearly half a million customers," Kirkby said.

"Our ongoing modernisation continues at pace, delivering a further step-up in fibre build and take-up, customer satisfaction and EBITDA. Benefits from our cost transformation more than offset lower revenue outside the UK and weak handset sales," she said. "We remain on track to deliver our financial outlook for this year and our cash flow inflection to c.£2.0bn in 2027 and c£3.0bn by the end of the decade."

It's natural for the CEO to emphasise the positives. But having had a solid start to her tenure, she now has a little more to prove.