Pipex announces the closure of Bulldog call centres

Pipex, the first UK broadband provider to offer WiMAX in the

UK, is expected to shut Bulldog call centers. Its management denied the plans to enter offshore but would strive to become a niche player in the UK broadband industry with an aim to provide best and fastest broadband service to UK customers run by UK staff.Pipex, which has a customer base of more than 1.1 million customers after it has purchased 118,000 customers of Bulldog (a subsidiary of Cable and Wireless) has been facing a fierce competition thanks to the innovative marketing strategies by other major broadband providers like TalkTalk and Sky. It is worthwhile to note that Pipex has both its own LLU lines and BT lines for which it pays substantial rental to BT due to its increasing home phone customers. Pipex also has achieved good level of penetration as far as residential broadband connections are concerned. However, Pipex has been recently coming up with new strategies to become a big player in the SME sector.Last month, Pipex released its annual financial results which were below expectations. Profit before tax fell to £4.8m from previous year’s figure of £5, down by more than 8 percent. Operating margins also saw a downfall with a decline of nearly 7 percent on-year-on basis. Pipex indicated that the costly acquisition and its payments to BT towards LLU usage have significantly cut the profits during the last financial year. As a positive sign, the customer base of Pipex crossed half-a-million mark thanks to the new acquisitions while the losses exceeded £17m.With the recent announcement, Pipex is about to stop services at the Bulldog call centres within three months. In a similar fashion, last month Pipex reported its intention to remove 19 staff of its customer service division from their positions. While these developments within Pipex may affect the quality of its customer service, Pipex management appears quite unruffled by this issue.