BT has released its half-year results, showing profits of more than £1 billion and revenues of £10.4 billion.
The results also demonstrated an acceleration in BT’s fiber rollout throughout the United Kingdom, as the company’s fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) build rate surged to 66,000 premises weekly, surpassing the previous quarter’s record of 860,000 premises passed.
Strong customer demand for FTTP was also observed by Openreach, with net additions of 364,000 in Q2, increasing the take-up rate to 33%.
“We’ve strengthened our competitive position with the launch of both New EE and our renewed strategy in Business, and Openreach has now built full fiber broadband to more than a third of the UK’s homes and businesses with a growing connection rate,” said Phillip Jansen, BT CEO. With £2.5 billion in annualized savings from the company’s transformation program, Jansen added that they are on track to reach their £3 billion savings goal by 2025.
It’s important to remember that BT raised prices by 14.4% in March of this year and announced that it will focus more on cost-cutting, aiming to eliminate about 55,000 jobs by the end of the decade, or about 40% of its current workforce. The company cited the need for more digitalization and streamlined operations in the current challenging economic environment.
According to Jansen, the need for network engineers would decline by about 10,000 as a result of the expanding role of AI and an additional 10,000 jobs could be replaced by automation related to AI.
