Research Update: GiffGaff Revenue Analysis & Treasury Operations
Mutual giving and a fair bit of taking....
If you can remember what you were doing in 2008 and were wondering what to do with any dormant entities you had lying around in your organisational hierarchy, you could have followed Telefonica’s lead and built a funky online MVNO with only a 3G SIM card product, no customer service and called it GiffGaff. Mad? Well not really, because it’s turned out to be a pretty good story and probably one of Telefonica’s better ideas.
I can’t recall if they were the first flanker brand, and to be entirely honest, I am not especially interested in their general financial and operational performance, despite them offering a great example of how to nail your marketing strategy. However, several years ago and not too far down their filed accounts, I became entirely fascinated by their refurbished device sales performance and what we might be able to imply. Therefore, the content of this update leans towards the handset implications rather than usual updates, although there’s a fascinating side-gig that’s definitely worth a mention.
Recap
O2 Communications Limited (04196996) was incorporated in April 2001 and then remained dormant until 2009. There was a hive of corporate secretarial activity including a short-lived name change to O2 Ash Limited in 2008 before the entity finally became GiffGaff a few months prior to launch on 25th November 2009. At the helm (until 2015) was Gav Thompson, head of O2 UK’s Brand Strategy, with eight principles and a “rather thin business plan”1. So, let’s see how that worked out…