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BT’s Q4 results contained a bombshell £1.3 billion write-down at Global Services to correct previous under-reporting of costs on two contracts, believed to be with the NHS and Reuters. Underlying EBITDA at Global Services also dropped sharply for the second quarter running

Annual pension contributions are to increase sharply, as expected, albeit to a level sustainable by the business. Performance at other divisions continues to be reasonable, given the economic environment

The company’s plans to cut costs have some credibility, but are expensive and will take time to implement. There is little prospect of meaningful recovery in cash flow until 2010

The OFT has delivered its verdict on ITV’s request for a review and modification of the CRR remedy that the Competition Commission imposed as a condition of the Carlton/Granada merger in 2003

In delivering its verdict, the OFT has chosen to sit on the fence. After recognising both the merits of the ITV case and the continuing concerns of the advertising community it reiterated earlier recommendations for minor changes in keeping with the times, but otherwise left it to the CC to decide what changes to make

The complexity of the CRR remedy and the polarised views of parties involved, as well as the burden of decision-making transferred to the CC, merely confirm the view that any significant modification to CRR will be a long time in coming, and almost certainly long after the start of the 2010 trading season, as previously suggested by ITV

The UK and international businesses (now ‘Worldwide’ and ‘CWI’) are both continuing to perform well, despite weak revenue growth, thanks to strong cost control. Worldwide is now generating cash organically for the first time in memory

Performance at the newly-acquired Thus has been slightly below expectations, mostly due to increased customer churn. The sale of the ‘mid-market’ part of the business is a possibility

The market was disappointed by guidance for the new financial year. In our view it is both acceptable and achievable

Newspaper publishers are about to enter a series of ‘online payment’ trials to help bolster disappointing online advertising performance that alone will be unable to support full scale newsrooms

Publishers are on the back foot, however: they have been giving away their content for free for almost a decade, and their core content does not have the unequivocal unique attributes of a football match, a movie or a pop song

While there are a variety of options for management to explore, in aggregate they will never match the print model, and so news is destined to shrink as a commercial enterprise for newspaper publishers

Carphone Warehouse’s distribution business had a slightly mixed year, with strong volumes and revenue mitigated by a sharp drop in margins and profit, with margin being sacrificed for market share

Given the very poor recession-hit market for handsets, Carphone Warehouse’s market share gains have been dramatic, so the sacrifice was at least not in vain

Although TalkTalk Group missed much of its guidance to March 2009, we now view new guidance as achievable, with the main risks related to the integration of Tiscali UK

In the following presentation we show our analysis of revenue growth trends for mobile operators in the top five European markets (UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain)

The historical analysis is based on the published results of the operators, although they include our estimates where their data is inconsistent or not complete. A copy of the underlying data in spreadsheet format is available to our subscription clients on request

According to press reports, Sky has lodged a bid of about £160 million for the VMtv content arm of Virgin Media (VMed), estimated to be 50-60% higher than other offers in the latest and final round of the bidding contest

At TalkTalk Group (TTG) net broadband additions for the quarter were relatively strong, given likely market growth, probably due at least in part to reduced subscriber loss at AOL UK

In our view cut-price business broadband, rather than IPTV, offers the best prospect of profitable revenue growth in fixed line

Steep declines in CD sales in major recorded music markets continued in 2009 as we had forecast last year (Recorded Music and Music Publishing [2008-39])

Sales of recorded music continue to be decimated by physical and online piracy, plus the disintermediation of the album purchase by the digital purchase of ‘cherry-picked’ tracks

A further knock-on effect on CD sales is the reduction in retailers’ shelf space devoted to music, including as a result of the bankruptcies of major chains (Circuit City, Woolworths and Zavvi) – what we have called the ‘perfect storm’ for the CD

Digital Britain Report’s “Universal Service Commitment” will make high speed broadband ubiquitously available, thus potentially boosting the adoption of illegal file-sharing by UK internet users. However, the government’s goal is to achieve a 70-80% reduction of illegal file-sharing activity