Carphone set for American roll-out

UK mobilephone company Carphone Warehouse today said it would take on the American market with the “rapid roll-out” of its partnership with US retailer Best Buy.

The mobile phone group said it hoped for between 150 and 200 stores, the majority of which will be “store within a store” concepts in existing Best Buy locations. The move follows a five month trial of Best Buy Mobile, which Carphone said had delivered encouraging results.

Setting out its annual strategy update, Carphone added that it was targeting 3.5 million residential broadband customers by March 2010.

It reported a figure of 2.27 million last month, adding that growth prospects have been boosted as more customers move onto unbundled lines, meaning Carphone supplies them directly rather than feeding its service through a BT line.

The TalkTalk service has been mired in controversy after Carphone’s offer of free broadband to those customers paying £20 a month for a landline phone resulted in a major decline in customer service standards.

Carphone said last month that it continued to invest in improving customer service, while also benefiting from further unbundling of BT exchanges.

However, chief executive Charles Dunstone told the Financial Times today that it may be until October before it clears a backlog of 260,000 loss-making free broadband customers.

Carphone makes an estimated loss of £5 per TalkTalk customer per month while they get their broadband service through wholesale products from BT.