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Carphone gets ready for 'enormous' iPhone launch
Nick Goodway, Evening Standard8 Nov 2007
Tomorrow's roll-out of the Apple iPhone is going to be "enormous", Carphone Warehouse chief executive Charles Dunstone said today.
Carphone, a handful of Apple stores and O2's outlets are the exclusive retailers of the handset in the UK. The £269 iPhone goes on sale from 6.02pm, with Carphone closing its 786 stores at 3pm in order to get the stock in and on display.
"Every able-bodied person in the company will be working this weekend," said Dunstone. "It is an amazing device, and customers have been asking for it in droves. We've got good quantities of stock - I just hope we've got enough."
He explained the odd time of the launch by saying that retailers were moving away from the traditional midnight release of new products.
"Frankly, loads of people wandering around very late at night with portable, expensive electronics under their arms just wasn't safe," he added. Dunstone expects the iPhone to boost the group's second-half retail sales significantly.
He is also seeing a big upturn in demand for data services. Consumers are now buying BlackBerries for themselves rather than just "as corporate toys for investment bankers" and making increasing use of mobile internet services from laptops, he said.
Dunstone also announced a ramp-up in Carphone's US joint venture with Best Buy, taking the number of mobile phone stores in the electronics retailer's outlets from 70 to up to 1000 by 2009.
"Given the experience of other UK retailers in the US, we are not investing huge amounts of capital in the venture but going with a strong partner who knows what it's doing," he said.
On the fixed-line business TalkTalk, Carphone has moved customers from BT's network to its own - thus saving rental charges to BT - more quickly than expected. By the end of September, 1.4 million or 55% of its broadband customers had been shifted across, and it aims to be over 70% by the year-end.
Carphone's first-half profits were at the top end of expectations, up from £15 million to £56 million on revenues 18% higher at £2.14 billion.
The dividend rises 25% to 1.25p. That means Dunstone, who still owns 33% of the shares, picks up £3.7 million.
