CEO's statement

A message from Matthew Key, Chief Executive Officer, O2 UK


Matthew Key, CEO, O2 UK

The mobile phone industry is growing up fast - and in 2005 the UK is one of the most competitive mobile phone markets in the world.

Collectively, the UK industry reached several milestones last year. For example, there are now more mobile phones than people, over 200 million mobile phone calls are made every day and 2.5 billion texts are sent every month. The mobile industry now contributes 2.2 per cent of the UK's total economic output.*

With this maturity comes increased competition - there are nine established operators in the UK today - and a strong rationale for embedding good corporate responsibility practice across every area in which we operate.

We are committed to responsible behaviour towards our customers, our people, the environment and society. This is both because it's the right thing to do and, if applied correctly, good business.

I'm absolutely clear that the closer we can get to the people who have views about how we do business - our customers, the communities we operate in and our own employees - the more effectively we can strengthen our performance and compete.

Every year we set ambitious targets for O2 UK's corporate responsibility programme and we have met most of the targets included in last year's report.

The highlights during 2004 included:

  • implementation of the UK Code of Practice on new forms of content, which seeks to protect children from accessing inappropriate content
  • focusing our energies on supporting a new flagship charity, Weston Spirit, and
  • improving the availability of information for the public and our employees on health issues associated with mobile phone technology.

However, the increasing range of options for either recycling or reselling old phones has resulted in a decline in the number of phones put through our recycling scheme. We aim to improve our performance in this area and have set ourselves a new target to encourage our customers to recycle their old phones.

I know employees across our business take pride in the work we are doing. They share my view that our brand will remain relevant and strong if our values and actions are seen to have real social meaning.

The 'How we do business in the United Kingdom' pages of the website provide an overview of our social and environmental activities and how we involve our key audiences: our customers, the communities in which we operate and our people.

* SOURCE 'The Contribution of Mobile Phones to the UK Economy, CEBR, May 2004'