BT Share Price (BT.A)

BT.A - BT Investor Summary

BT Group is a large telecommunications and media company and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 share price index. The company is the legacy of the national telecommunication system in the UK. Early providers of telephony had been nationalised in the late 19th century and were later passed over to the Post Office. Having become a separate division the British Telecom brand was introduced in the early 1980s to prepare the division for privatisation. The telecoms market was opened to competition in 1982 and public shares in BT were offered in 1984 with the UK government divesting all their ownership of the company by the early 1990s. The private company shortly afterwards entered the Irish telecoms and internet service market.

The company also had an interest in the GSM mobile phone market in the early 1990s through the launch of Cellnet, which became BT Cellnet and later o2, until it was divested as a separate entity in 2000. The privatisation of BT also left the company with ownership of the 'Yellow Pages' information directory. This was spun off as a separate entity in 2001 allowing BT to move its focus towards offering innovative network solutions. The company now offers home entertainment services through the BT Home Hub system. BT retains a universal service requirement throughout Britain for maintaining the physical network and currently operates maintainance services under the BT Openreach brand. In the year ending 2008 the company showed a pre-tax net profit of £1.9 billion on revenues of £20.7 billion. The company has significant international interests and employs over 100,000 people across more than 70 countries.