THUS

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

~ the goodbye ~

Electricity privatization in Britain produced a strange side effect. The power companies already had rights of way over every inch of the country, and in the early 1990s several of them worked out that a cable carrying data could follow the same route as a cable carrying current. Scottish Power started selling telecom service in 1994 under the name Scottish Telecom. By March 1999 it ran about 2,550 kilometers of optical fiber and switched traffic out of four buildings, two in Scotland and two in England.

It bought its way into the consumer internet on 1 May 1998, paying £66 million in cash for Demon Internet, then the best-known independent ISP in Britain. Put together with the Scotland On-Line and Prestel operations it already had, that gave Scottish Power over 275,000 internet customers, and a business that had gone from 166 employees in 1996 to more than 2,500 four years later.

The name changed in October 1999, two months before the flotation, and the reason was geographic. Research kept saying that people in England heard "Scottish Telecom" and thought of a regional monopoly, which was not the business anyone wanted to sell. So the company became THUS, an adverb, and registered letitbethus.com to explain itself.

~ the chronicle ~

~ 330p ~

Scottish Power floated 49.9 percent of THUS on 10 November 1999. The shares opened at 330 pence and touched 387.5 pence during the day. The company came out valued around £2.2 billion, which was 700 million more than the £1.5 billion the press had been told to expect a month earlier. Scottish Power booked an exceptional gain of £787 million before tax on the sale of a business it had started from nothing five years before.

The high point lasted nine months. On 1 August 2000 Demon issued a profit warning, blaming the sudden arrival of flat-rate unmetered providers who had made per-minute dial-up unsellable, and 30 percent of THUS came off the share price in a day. Operating losses for the half were £18 million against £4.6 million the year before. Scottish Power spent the next nineteen months getting out: it put £275 million of new equity into THUS, which temporarily pushed its stake from 50.1 percent up to 72.4 percent, and then handed the whole holding to its own shareholders as a dividend in specie on 19 March 2002. Every hundred Scottish Power shares came with 53.76 shares of a telecom company losing £64 million a year.

~ the fiber ~

What is easy to miss under the share price is that the network was real and it kept being built. The route length went from 2,550 kilometers in 1999 to over 5,200 a year later, which the parent company called the fastest rollout anyone in Britain had managed, and reached 10,500 kilometers with more than 190 points of presence by 2008. The customer base turned into mid-sized British businesses rather than households. Revenue was £533 million in the year to March 2007 and around £575 million the year after, and when the competition authority looked at it in 2008 it put THUS at between five and ten percent of UK business communications. Measured as a business rather than against its own 1999 share price, it was substantial the whole way through.

~ three owners in four years ~

Cable and Wireless made a preliminary approach on 28 May 2008 and then did something more direct: on 30 June it simply bought 29.9 percent of the shares on the market and announced an offer of 180 pence for the rest, valuing THUS at about £330 million. Its chairman called that a generous premium of 64 percent, which it was, measured against a price that had already been through everything described above. The board recommended it on 1 September, the Office of Fair Trading cleared it eleven days after that, and the offer went unconditional on 1 October 2008. The brand survived in the demoted form that acquirers use when they have bought a customer list: THUS, a Cable and Wireless business.

Then the owner changed twice more without THUS doing anything. Cable and Wireless split itself in two in March 2010 and THUS went into the half called Cable and Wireless Worldwide. Vodafone bought that half in July 2012. By then the end was arithmetic. On 31 March 2013, the last day of Vodafone's financial year, Thus Limited sold its trade and net assets to Vodafone Limited for £35,386,000, a number its own auditors describe as simply the book value of what was moved. The directors' report for that year is the last one written about a trading company, and it says the services had still been sold under the THUS and Demon names right up to the transfer. The following year's report has one sentence that matters: the company was dormant throughout.

~ still filing ~

Nobody wound any of it up. THUS Group Holdings Limited, incorporated in January 1999 as Scottish Power Telecommunications Holdings and renamed twice since, is still active on the Scottish register at an Edinburgh address, and so is THUS Group Limited. The third survivor is Thus Limited, whose registered office is Vodafone House, The Connection, Newbury, and which has filed accounts for a dormant company every year since 2014. thus.co.uk stopped resolving long ago, and the last version of it anyone captured was a default page from a control panel in October 2012. The other domain, thus.net, still works. It answers with a redirect to vodafone.co.uk, where a search for the word returns nothing at all.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »