Optus To Slash 1,000 Jobs After Paying Over $180M For Brit Premier League Rights
Optus who has been telling everyone how good their business is going is about to slash 1,000 jobs, secret documents have revealed.
The Singapore owned telco is looking to slash costs by over $200M according to the Australian.
Optus’ half-year results saw net profit for the six-months ending September 30 rise by 8 per cent to $426 million despite losing 44,000 mobile customers.
Optus now has 9.36 million mobile subscribers when wholesale customers are included compared to Telstra’s 16.7 million users and Vodafone Hutchison Australia’s 4.9 million, which does not include wholesale customers.
The move is seen as a way to protect profits as demand for mobiles slips. Questions are also being raised about the demand that Premier League Soccer will generate after Optus forked out a reported $189m bid to secure streaming rights for the English League games. The amount paid by Optus is twice what previous holder Fox Sports paid for the rights.
Last year Optus CEO Allen Lew warned that Optus’ revenues would take a major hit due to a decision by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to slash the amount money carriers could make from phone calls and text messages.
“In one quarter that’s a $200 million hit so that will be a big dampener on our mobile service revenue growth,” he said.
It now appears that Optus is looking to recover costs by slashing jobs.
The Australian said that Optus has drawn up plans to slash 10 per cent of its workforce.
The Australian has obtained confidential documents from within Optus that show customer service and network roles in the telco’s consumer arm will be decimated by the cuts at a time when it is trying to win market share on the National Broadband Network and claw back territory from Telstra in the race to sign up mobile customers.
The documents, which were never intended for public disclosure and were delivered to senior Optus executives in recent weeks, set out an ambitious cost-cutting program that could see as many as 1011 staff removed from the telco’s consumer business in its next financial year, which runs from April 1 to March 31 next year, the Australian said.
“As part of our FY17 plan, we have included $215m cost-out ?initiatives to protect profitability,” the documents say.
