14 DAY TRIAL // Carphone Warehouse, the UK's largest mobile phone retailer has recently announced that it expects to open 250 new stores by March 2008 as well as boost its subscriptions by 15 percent over the same period of time. The London-based company also aims to raise its dividend by 30 percent next year.
CEO Charles Dunstone made the announcements in a strategy update to investors. He said: "In broadband, we are targeting 3.5 million residential customers by March 2010.
Provisioning times are falling as the unbundling process becomes more streamlined, and we are confident that our increased investment in customer service will deliver a much improved customer experience."
Last year, Carphone Warehouse bought the UK customer base of AOL's Internet access business from Time Warner and claimed that it targeted 3.5 million broadband customers and as many as 5 million residential customers in total, by March 2010.
By acquiring 2 million AOL customers in the UK, Carphone Warehouse became the nation's third largest provider of broadband services. Although having reached 2.27 million customers last month, only 655,000 of them were taking TalkTalk broadband using the Carphone's own network rather than broadband lines that the company needs to rent at a ?5 a month loss from BT.
Moreover, the company will be entering the US market this year with an expansion of its Best Buy Mobile joint venture. According to Carphone Warehouse, the five-month trial of Best Buy Mobile delivered encouraging results. The company is now planning to expand the concept to around 150-200 stores throughout the next 18 months. Most of them will be 'store within a store' concepts in existing Best Buy locations.