PlusNet: Soon to be NegativeNet

PlusNet, a small UK Quoted ISP, published its' interim results yesterday and only added a miserly 3k broadband customers in the quarter. PlusNet is the #8 UK Broadband provider and now has 195k customers.

It really is between a rock and a hard place. Although profitable, PlusNet does not have the sort of money to allow it to go building LLU infrastructure and actually has signed a wholesale deal with Tiscali. It cannot afford to go head-to-head with the big guns with marketing spend. I actually feel sorry for the position PlusNet is in, after all it is a Yorkshire company. However, I think investors should think of doing the same as the original founder, who sold up in 1999 to start ebuyer.com which is now one of the UK’s biggest online retailers.

Unfortunately as well as the market moving against it, PlusNet inflicted a couple of self-inflicted wounds during the quarter: one was the loss of customer email data and the other was the sending out of 20k of its’ customer addresses (as if the churn wasn’t bad enough)

Even the Marketing Director admits that “PlusNet is not going through a great time right now...”