Broad Progress for Tiscali

Tiscali announced a shortened form of half year results yesterday – full results are due in mid-September. They revealed they had 1.2m broadband customers in the UK a gain of 265k for the half year. According to my maths that is around 20% of the total market adds which is not bad at all, especially seeing that Tiscali does not have the marketing clout of the big guns. It is certainly a lot better than Orange/Wanadoo/France Telecom. The slight complication is that the 1.2m includes both retail & wholesale customers so we do not know where the growth is yet.

The big question for the Tiscali board is whether it is the time to sell up: with operations in the UK, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands it is a perfect fit for a certain cellular company and with a market cap of less than a €1bn, Tiscali is easily digestible.