The specialist

Prior to the sale of its airtime distribution business to The Carphone Warehouse in December 2005, the Hugh Symons Group was made up of a number of different business units, engaged in various market sectors. It was founded way back in 1971 and most of its component parts pre-date the mobile phone industry altogether.

Hugh Symons divisional units included a business and data products company that traded under the banner Hugh Symons Mobile Data and an IT equipment distributor called Hugh Symons Computing Solutions, as well as the mobile airtime business Hugh Symons Communications (HSC).

Despite working out of the same offices in Poole, Dorset, under the same umbrella brand, the units worked separately from each other. In that sense, nothing much has changed except for the ownership of HSC. The same faces, at the same desks, on the same site on a commuter road between Poole and Bournemouth.

But Hugh Roper, son of Hugh Symons founder Geoff Roper and managing director of the old group, subsumed the old data and IT equipment divisions into a new unit, called Hugh Symons Telecom (HST), a year before the Carphone deal.

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