The new chief executive of Orange will lay out his strategy for reviving the mobile phone and broadband company tomorrow, in a move that is expected to cost several hundred UK jobs and one of the most memorable advertising slogans of the past 20 years.
Tom Alexander is ditching "the future's bright, the future's Orange", created by advertising agency WCRS to launch the operator in 1994, as he tries to revitalise the company. Orange has gone from the darling of the mobile phone industry under founder Hans Snook to the smallest of the original four UK networks under the ownership of France Telecom.
Alexander, a former boss of Virgin Mobile who joined Orange late last year, plans to cut costs by axing several hundred managers from a workforce of 12,500 and increasing call-centre staff to improve customer service. There will also be a major advertising push over the summer.
In an email to staff yesterday, Alexander characterised his new plans as "The Agenda". He said: "There's a lot of change planned in order to put us back where we belong - at the top of our game."
One of the company's biggest problems is its broadband business. In a booming UK broadband market, it has been losing customers to existing players such as TalkTalk and new entrants such as BSkyB. Orange had 1.142 million broadband customers in September, 1.138 million at the end of the year and 1.107 million in March.
Orange faces fiercer competition for residential broadband customers this year as rival companies o2 (now Sky) and Vodafone raise marketing expenditure on "converged" broadband and mobile phone offerings.
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