BT 2003 Annual Report Download - page 7

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Chief Executive’s statement
Ben Verwaayen, Chief Executive, explains that BT will create value for
shareholders by its passion for customer service, its focus on profitable
growth and its commitment to broadband.
6BT Annual Report and Form 20-F 2003
A year ago, I said that there were three main parts to
BT’s strategy. This year, I’m saying the same thing.
First, we have a passion for customers. Second, we
have broadband at the heart of BT – and BT at the
heart of broadband. Third, we have rigorous
financial discipline.
By concentrating on these three priorities we can
continue to reward shareholders, drive down debt and
invest in the business – where it matters.
First and foremost, we are passionate about
customers. Every time we deal with a customer,
our goal is to deliver an excellent experience – an
experience which is simple, but also complete.
We are working to meet the needs that customers
have today. And we are innovating to meet the needs
they will have tomorrow.
This means getting ever closer to customers,
understanding their lifestyles and businesses,
establishing long-term relationships with them.
We are proud to serve individuals, families, small
or medium-sized businesses, and global corporations.
In the past year, our passion for customers has
delivered results. For example:
&consumers and businesses are now more satisfied
with the way we provide and repair their services,
as shown by our satisfaction surveys
&packages such as BT Together, which has
ten million residential customers, have been a major
success story. From June this year, BT Together will be
even simpler, making minute-by-minute charges for
evening and weekend calling a thing of the past
&we are the UK’s leading internet service provider
for small and medium businesses
&the order book for our solutions business is very
strong and orders worth £3.6 billion were taken during
the 2003 financial year, including a major e1 billion
contract to manage Unilever’s worldwide
communications network for seven years
&we promised that our major European operations
would break even at the EBITDA level and, thanks to
our market success and efficiency programme,
we delivered
&new business revenues among wholesale
customers (other telecoms operators and internet
service providers) grew by 85% year on year
&and, very importantly, overall customer
dissatisfaction was significantly down by 37% for the
company (against the target we set of 25%).
Broadband is the biggest opportunity for growth
in the communications market. It’s no exaggeration
to say that it will be as important to our future as
voice telephone calls were to our past. Broadband is
more than just another product. It is a whole new way
of communicating. It sparks off tremendous demand
and is growing at a rapid rate – connections having
increased almost fourfold in the 2003 financial year.
Our record over the past year shows how we are
meeting this demand:
&at 31 March 2003, we had around 800,000 ADSL
(asymmetric digital subscriber line) connections, and we
are well on the way to reaching our target of one million
this summer