British Telecommunications Plc has announced healthy end of year pre-tax profits to March 31 1991, up 14.2% at UKP3.07m. The figures are in comparison with 1990 figures before the UKP390m exceptional charge last year. Turnover grew by 6.8% at UKP13.1m. BT’s chairman Iain Vallance declared himself pleased with the results and was at pains to stress, that the important thing was not what we’ve done, but how we’ve done it. Vallance is particularly happy that the profit has come about through increased efficiency and more efficient management, not least of which was the 19,000 redundancies from the workforce. Despite reporting good profits, Vallance said the redundancies were likely to continue in the coming financial year, in five figures but they will be considerably lower than last year. And he added that better network technology was bound to lead to fewer jobs. Both inland and international telephone call revenues were adversely affected in the latter part of the year by the recession. Inland calls increased by 4% and international calls were up 6%, compared with rises of 10% and 13% last year. However exchange line rental revenues were up 15.7% to UKP1,894m, assisted by British Telecom’s insistence on raising prices, on what it called this heavily lossmaking service. – in the government’s green paper on telecommunications, the company won an important concession, enabling it charge for each phone service according to the cost of providing the service: it had been lobbying for an end to crosssubsidy for some time. In the autumn the company plans to launch a lifeline scheme, enabling customers that rarely use their telephone to pay around half of the normal line rental fees, and obtain 30 units of free calls after which the cost per unit will be increased. On prices, Vallance stressed that overall, the increeases would be kept below the 6.25% agreed with the government and he said that if the inflation fell to below 6%, there would be nominal price increases only. He said that since privatisation in 1984, there had been a 26% reduction in telephone charges and commented that in the frequent criticisms levelled at the company, the way that it had reduced prices was often overlooked.
