It has long been a source of curiosity to me how many mobile phone shops there are, especially here in Britain. There are numerous chains as well the network operators growing range of shops. And they all look expensive and shiny. Clearly they are making disproportionately large profits. It has long been time for the margins to start pushing specialist retails into the fringes, just like in any other domain.

So now it has started. Vodafone are stopping The Carphone Warehouse from selling Contract devices, although Pay as You Go is still available. While you can never rule out megalomania when dealing with network operators, it certainly looks like the retail approach is going to change. I expect to see more, similar announcements over the next few months.

I’m not worried about the future of The Carphone Warehouse as they are a strong and effective chain with many other strings to their bow.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 14th, 2006 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.