Days after moving to sack two hundred staff Optus management are now looking at a possible restructure of their franchise operation according to insiders, in particular the distributors who supply them and the third-party products they sell in their stores.
According to people that ChannelNews has spoken to, head office and retail store management, want more control over what franchisees order and from whom .
Currently the Optus franchisee network consists of around 380 stores with franchisees able to pick which distributors they buy from.
However, this could change in the future with franchisees told which distributors they are allowed to deal with.
While no decisions have been made, the sacking of 200 staff recently has in put on hold several projects that management were considering before their massive network failure that led to the sudden exit of the Companies CEO,
Optus boss Kelly Bayer Rosmarin parted ways with the telecommunications group following the network failure that also led to her exit and that of former network boss Lambo Kanagaratnam who was running the Sintel network when the failure happened.
The business is now being run by interim CEO and CFO Michael Venter.
Among the distributors who supply Optus franchisees are Likewize Australia, who formerly operated as Brightstar, they currently have a close relationship with Optus franchisees along with Cellnet and Force Technology.
They are also the same Company that 2021 announced the A$200 million acquisition of an Optus subsidiary that led to a a 15-year partnership with Optus.
Owned by a US entity ChannelNews understands that they trying to become the sole supplier with insiders describing this as “A big risk.”
One insider said “This project was being discussed prior to the network crash. Optus management want greater say over what franchisees sell similar to what Telstra does”.
“Not everything that Telstra does in their stores worth with the carrier sitting on a large amount of their Sprout house brand audio products, so much that it was recently being sold on Coles Specials racks to shift stock.”
“There are some in Optus who believe that the network should be left as it is because the franchisees not only know their own target audience, but they also have the financial liability for the stock they are selling.”
At this stage Optus has not commented.
