Our strategy is continuously evolving to ensure we build on our strengths and allow us to respond to market opportunities and challenges.
We have a strong set of assets, including a leading position in the UK in fixed and mobile access networks, with strong and clearly segmented brands. We have deep relationships with a wide range of customers including consumers, public and private sector organisations (large and small) across the UK and multinational corporations around the world. We also enjoy close strategic partnerships with key content, technology, device and service vendors.
Combined, this means that we are uniquely positioned to lead network, product and service convergence across the consumer and enterprise markets, which we see as a critical market trend and an opportunity to drive further value for our business.
Like all businesses, we must continually adapt to our market environment. Data consumption and network capacity requirements are increasing exponentially and our enterprise customers want to migrate from legacy communications products towards digital, converged and secure products and solutions. We are also seeing a new wave of infrastructure investment in fibre-to-the-premises and mobile coverage and technology. Competition remains intense across the sector from both established and new entrants.
Our strategy is to lead in converged connectivity and services, capitalising on new business opportunities and delivering industry-leading operational efficiency. This is to support our goal of delivering sustainable growth in value.
Our markets are transitioning but they are still based on the universal need to connect and communicate, a need which has never been more essential.
Creating experiences for our customers that truly differentiate us from our competitors is at the centre of our strategic framework. Everything we do with respect to building the best converged network, and becoming a simpler, leaner and more agile business, needs to ultimately support our strategy to deliver great customer experience.
We have underpinned our strategy to fulfil the needs of two other critical stakeholder groups – our people and the communities in which we do business. For our people, our strategy is to make BT a brilliant place to work. For the communities we operate in, our strategy is to be a valued partner in helping to build better digital lives.
We will further differentiate our propositions, to retain and expand value. We’ll do this by creating innovative new propositions, improving value for money, offering better service, and making it easier to do business with us.
We’ve made progress with customer experience in recent years, but there’s much more to do.
In UK fixed, we’ll accelerate our investments in ultrafast full fibre broadband with a target to build to 20 million premises by the mid- to late-2020s.
In UK mobile, we’ll expand our leadership in 4G coverage and capacity, and we intend to lead the market to 5G too.
Ultimately our aim is to build a single, integrated all-IP fibre network. Our investment will allow us to progressively close down legacy products such as the public switched telephone network, lead the market in advanced digital products, improve customer experience, and reduce our operating costs.
We need to create a modern, efficient organisation to support the investments we’ll be making over the coming years in our networks and to drive sustainable value from them in the future.
There are four key areas we’ll be looking at to achieve this:
- we will simplify our portfolio from thousands of product variations that are often outdated and expensive to support;
- we’ll transform our customer journeys to reduce manual intervention;
- we’ll accelerate the time it takes to get products to market; and
- we will migrate customers from our decades-old legacy networks to our modern FTTP and 5G networks.
