Cable & Wireless in last ditched restructuring attempt

Cable & Wireless (C&W), the UK's long time number 2 provider of fixed line services has announced another restructuring and will part with it's latest CEO, Francesco Caio. C&W, which has spent the last couple of years reinventing itself now has to face up to the fact that their UK business is in deep trouble and their international business probably needs to be sold off (or is it the other way round).

C&W like so many encumbant fixed line players is paying a huge price for being too slow in switching to IP based telephony. Now they're losing customers and margins at a perilous rate. And they cannot fully implement their new IP based network until 2009. They could be dead by then.

3 years could see most of the UK market having already shifted to other IP networks. Just look at the French market for evidence. So, C&W is doing the only thing that they can do.

They're separating out their profitable and reasonably successful international franchise (mainly in the Carribean) and they have promoted the well known entrepreneur and head of Energis, John Pluthero, to run the UK business.

Maybe Pluthero will in turn engineer a management buy-out of C&W UK with some friendly private equity groups and C&W can sell the international business to any number of telco's in the US or Western Europe. Either way the group looks destined for a major change. Let's hope it's for the better this time round.