T-Mobile has Virgin which leaves Vodafone

T-Mobile has Virgin, which leaves Vodafone.The world’s largest mobile company is hardly desperate for the business. Before, the business was about subsidising handsets to get them into the hands of the consumer. Now we are separating the provision of handset from the provision of airtime.”In a nutshell, easyMobile will buy capacity on an existing mobile network at wholesale prices and then retail that airtime to consumers using the internet instead of high street shops, making a margin in the middle.Consumers will receive a new SIM card from easyMobile which they just pop into their existing handsets.It all sounds terribly simple and in theory it is. One major problem, however, is that handsets are generally sold with a contract to a particular network operator and so are locked-in. Stelios – who admits he is no expert – was at a loss yesterday as to how easyMobile would overcome that problem.Signing up with an existing network operator willing to carry easyMobile calls will not be a shoo-in either. A spokeswoman for Orange said yesterday: “It is creating confusion.

Talks are under way between Stelios and the French-owned operator to try to avoid a messy legal wrangle and work out who, exactly, has the right to use orange as their corporate colour.The French, however, are sounding ominously stubborn. For instance, the planned mobile phone business has no network agreement in the UK, so Stelios has no means, as yet, of actually carrying calls.He is in talks to piggy-back on the network of Vodafone but no agreement has been reached.Orange, the France Telecom subsidiary, is objecting to easyGroup’s planned use of the same corporate colour to brand its new mobile venture. Both were formed more than five years ago but are still proving a drain on resources.”They are not they yet but they are getting there,” Stelios said yesterday when asked when they might break even.Stelios has raised £31m in the past year by selling shares in easyJet to fund his loss-making ventures and establish concerns such as easyCinema. It also details the new ventures which Stelios has promised to unleash, including easyPizza and easy4men, a toiletries range.Few, if any, of the easyGroup businesses launched since easyJet in 1995 are making money.

Two in particular – easyInternetcaf?nd easyCar – have been soaking up capital from Stelios’s main source of cash, his remaining stake in easyJet. Investors will also have had the bone of the 100p special dividend to chew on.Keeping Mr Myners in post for the best part of a year avoids him appearing a lame duck chairman and means M&S will not be pestered quite so much by constant speculation over the identity of his successor.It also means that there will be a hole to fill on the board of mmO2, which Mr Myners is stepping down from to devote sufficient time to M&S. But the £250m of cost savings he has promised in the first year of the recovery strategy should begin to show through earlier. For that, we will probably have to wait until next spring or perhaps later before new product appears in the stores. His blueprint for M&S, laid out in July, made no mention of sales growth.

Another is that it has decided it can proceed at a more leisurely pace now that the boss of BhS is no longer breathing down its neck.A third is that no one in their right minds would take on the job until there are some concrete signs that the recovery strategy announced by the new chief executive Stuart Rose begins to bear fruit.There is probably not a lot Mr Rose and his new management team can do about trading this Christmas since the die will have been cast and the stock ordered before he arrived on the scene in May. Having begun very much as a stop-gap solution whilst a permanent successor was sought to Luc Vandevelde, we now discover that Mr Myners could stay in the post right through until the annual meeting next July.In the meantime the search for a permanent replacement continues apace and, of course, if an outstanding candidate comes along earlier then he will step down.What on earth could be going on behind the shutters at Baker Street? One explanation is that it is taking M&S rather longer to find a chairman than it bargained for. On the other hand, that could make yesterday’s rate rise the last one before the presidential election in November.Myners and M&S The board of Marks and Spencer has decided that its interim chairman Paul Myners has a longer shelf life than it first thought when he was parachuted into the job as part of the defence against Philip Green. Then we will all the wondering what the fuss was about.If it does not, then it will spell bad news for President George Bush, compounding the politically damaging impression that this is a jobless recovery. Another is that one economist’s poor employment figures are another’s productivity miracle. How to justify a further increase in rates when the evidence points in the other direction?One answer is that jobs are being created by US companies – it’s just that they aren’t in America.