3 Grows Up

It wasn’t until Bob Fuller took over as CEO in May 2003 that we got some straight-talking from 3, which finally started making a song and dance about the great deals on offer, and finally started winning customers. Two and a bit years later, after limping to just 210,000 customers in the first nine months, the network has 3.2 million customers in the UK, all of whom can access 3G services. That’s more than all the other UK networks put together. Having established a foothold, it now sees the time is right to start claiming the 3G high ground, pushing into new areas. Speaking at the launch about the variety of services on offer via the 3 network today, from video calls to music downloads to web browsing, and multi-user games, CEO Bob Fuller put it like this:
"We at 3 brought all of that to you. We did it. We built a network from scratch that delivered all this technological change, all these new services. It didn’t exist before we came along and frankly it still would not exist if we weren’t forcing the issue."
Tellingly, even with its 3.2 million customers, Three is not revisiting its former obsession with video calls, but pushing the idea of content, promoting music and video downloads video uploads, and mobile TV.
It’s perhaps not surprising that 3 should have found its feet so quickly. Ask anyone for an example of a textbook mobile phone network launch and they will probably say: ‘Orange’. And where was Fuller between 1997 and 2000? Orange of course. COO Gareth Jones is also ex-Orange, as is CFO Andrew Moffatt. Marketing Director Graham Oxby was with Orange for the first three years of its life.
It’s not out of the woods yet of course. Even the usually implacable Fuller looked slightly less laid back than usual when a persistent hack at the launch event pressed him to break text messaging out of the £250m of revenue coming from non-voice sources.
And when asked whether the ads it intends to show to its customers on their handsets would be permission-based and opted-in, the answer given by COO Gareth Jones: "That’s where we’ll get to with it" was not quite as unequivocal as it might have been.
But the 3 of today is certainly a lot more confident, a lot more surefooted, than the 3 of just two years ago. It’s already been through the learning curve that some of the other networks are only just going through. Of course, there’s too much experience at the likes of Vodafone and Orange, and too much resting on it, to assume that the other networks won’t put up a good fight. But while they get their 3G act together, 3 certainly seems to be enjoying its first-mover advantage.

www.three.co.uk