He halved the dividend and he halved the share price. The financial scorecard for Philip Jansen’s time as chief executive of BT – he’s off in January after five years in charge – is not pretty. The big hope was that the telecoms group, after a deal with regulators to get Openreach to pull its finger out on fast-fibre broadband rollout, would finally be re-rated as a go-getting 21st-century provider of critical infrastructure. It has not been fulfilled.
Thursday’s decent half-year numbers, the last on Jansen’s watch, delivered an upward tick for the shares but nothing to alter the general lack of buzz around BT over the past year. Even takeover talk, the result of the French billionaire Patrick Drahi’s Altice Group building a 24.5% stake, has gone quiet.
