Three way restructuring for Telstra BigPond

Telecom giant Telstra has taken a big step forward in its attempts to become one of the biggest media companies in Australia by the sudden restructuring of BigPond, its consumer service arm in an effort to move its content business into a single entity.

BigPond will be split into three sections by the main Australian telco: the Retail and marketing side will be run be David Moffatt who is the consumer chief at Telstra whilst the consumer internet services will go to Greg Winn. Justin Milne, the chief of the former BigPond will gain control of the last part of BigPond which is Telstra’s online content properties making him the Telstra Media general managing director.

The ongoing competition between BigPond and the other big content arm for Telstra, pay-TV group Foxtel which it has 50 percent ownership of could be stopped by the restructuring.

At the moment there is heated competition between Foxtel with their movies on demand and BigPond using a download movie service but Mr Milne confirmed that the two businesses could learn lots from each other.

He said “I hope this restructure can improve the way we work together, the idea of there being competition between BigPond and Foxtel is a bit of a furphy. Foxtel is a multi-billion-dollar business with its revenue coming from pay-TV and BigPond is a multi-billion-dollar business with most of its revenue coming from internet access. The path of our worlds where we intersect around movie downloads is small compared to the main lines of business.”

A spokesperson for Telstra advised that the broadband market share for Bigpond has seen a rise from 37 percent to 49 percent in the last six years and it has increase the revenue averages per user whilst reducing its customer churn.