Energis

» see energis.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Every account I opened in Turkey in those years, whether from Superonline or from Turknet, came down the same copper, because Türk Telekom owned the wire and there was no second wire to own. Britain got a second wire. The way it got one was by hanging fiber on electricity pylons.

It was incorporated on 18 July 1991 under the name Telecom Electric Limited, demerged out of the National Grid Company, the body that runs the high-voltage transmission system across England and Wales. The grid already owned a right of way to every corner of the country in the form of steel towers, and the towers already carried wire. Running optical fiber along the same structures meant Energis could put a national backbone in place without digging up a road for most of its length. It sold to businesses rather than households, and by the end of the 1990s it was carrying the Post Office branch network through Fujitsu and the distribution of television and radio for the BBC.

The flotation came at the end of 1997 on the London exchange, with Wikipedia saying October and contemporary reporting putting it in December. Then came the part everybody did. Energis bought Planet Online, the Leeds internet company that had built Freeserve for Dixons, and in December 2000 it agreed to buy the German hosting group Ision. The money for that was borrowed. On 9 February 2000, with the market at its most enthusiastic, National Grid placed thirty million Energis shares with institutions at £33.80 each and told the exchange the gross proceeds would be around a billion pounds.

Within two and a half years the arithmetic arrived. Energis plc went into administration on 16 July 2002, its British operations transferred the same day into Energis Communications Ltd under a new holding company the banks owned, called Chelys. Archie Norman came in as chairman and John Pluthero as chief executive, the German business was sold off that November, and the remainder kept trading under the name for another three years at a fraction of the size. Cable & Wireless bought it for £594 million and the company passed over on 11 November 2005.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the wire on the pylons ~

The pylon trick is the detail worth keeping. Laying a national fiber network normally means trenching beside roads and railways and negotiating with every landowner and council on the route, for years. An electricity transmission operator has already done all of that, once, for a different reason. The standard method is to wrap the fiber onto the earth wire that runs along the top of the towers, above the live lines, where it sits to take lightning strikes, and in one stroke you have a backbone that goes wherever the power goes. Of all the ways to compete with an incumbent telephone company, this one needed the least permission.

~ thirty-three pounds eighty ~

The February 2000 placing is the clearest surviving photograph of the bubble this company lived inside. National Grid sold twenty-seven million shares with a three million share over-allotment option on top, priced at 3380 pence. The announcement to the market put gross proceeds near a billion pounds and said the grid would keep an economic interest of about 36 percent of Energis afterwards. When the option was only partly taken up three weeks later, the final total came to roughly £977 million.

The same announcement listed Energis shareholders' funds at £329.0 million and a loss of £30.3 million for the year to 31 March 1999. Institutions bought thirty million shares in a company on those numbers at £33.80 each. The administration order came twenty-nine months after that.

~ still not dissolved ~

Energis is one of the slowest corporate deaths on this site. The administration order against Energis plc, the 1997 holding company, started on 16 July 2002 and was not discharged until 28 February 2019, sixteen years and seven months later. On the same day the company passed straight into compulsory liquidation, on a petition filed that January. Companies House records the winding up as concluded on 27 July 2026 and the company as due to be dissolved on 1 January 2027.

That is twenty-four and a half years of legal afterlife for a business that stopped being Energis in 2005. Both of its domains answer nothing today. Neither energis.co.uk nor energis.com carries an address record of any kind, which for a brand this well known is unusual: nobody resold either name and nobody squatted it, and the zones sit empty while the paperwork finishes.

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