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Carphone's jolly tidings

Carphone Warehouse's Q3 results were announced today, and it sure looks shiny for Dunstone et al. Well, sort of.
Written by David Meyer, Contributor

Carphone Warehouse's Q3 results were announced today, and it sure looks shiny for Dunstone et al. Well, sort of.

Revenue gained 32 percent (chiefly from CPW's fixed line business - the desired knock-on effect of "free" bundled broadband) in the Christmas quarter. The share price went up a wee bit today as a result, and someone sold 3.9 percent of the stock (not a company director, apparently).

Interestingly, it's now being claimed that CPW will have 1000 exchanges unbundled by the end of April, "slightly ahead" of schedule according to the FD. If memory serves correctly, that was pretty much always the target (and acquiring AOL's 52 unbundled exchanges certainly helped) but, either way, that'll be about 70 percent of the UK population covered.

TalkTalk broadband subs are up, but not nearly as much as the previous quarter when "free" broadband was first punted. However, out of 632k TalkTalk subscriptions, just 132k are connected through CPW's own exchanges. And, just to put things in perspective, the AOL purchase brought in about 1.5m further broadband customers.

Seeing as Dunstone's already having trouble keeping his customers happy, we do sincerely wish him luck.

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