Carphon’s wireless world

The Carphone Warehouse has taken a 10 per cent share of the laptop market in little more than six months. Group chief executive Charles Dunstone’s seemingly wild claim, in April, that Carphone could do for laptops what it had done for mobiles now appears prescient.

It has galvanised the mobile industry to the point O2 is the only major retailer not currently offering laptops bundled with mobile broadband airtime. The rest have all entered laptop retail, while O2 is already refitting its store estate for the new ‘connected world’.

Traditional computer retailers have also been shaken by Carphone’s almost single-handed establishment of a new sub-market in mini-laptop/mobile broadband deals (‘netbooks’, or ‘webbooks’) and its subsequent move into the mid-price ‘notebook’ market.

They don’t tend to have the network relations or systems to subsidise laptops with mobile broadband subscriptions, as the budget netbook market has grown on.

But Carphone – emboldened by the financial muscle from its Best Buy joint venture, which starts to roll out big box format electronics stores on UK retail parks early next year – is not stopping at entry-level laptops.

And if there is one shop in its 800-odd store estate that encapsulates its present idea of the future of mobile sales, its the retailer’s new premises in London’s Westfield Shopping Centre, Shepherd’s Bush.

The Westfield store, opened on October 30, is Carphone’s biggest outlet and ranges the most products; it is designed according to its vision of a ‘wireless world’.

The store will be followed this month by similar flagship outlets in Portsmouth and Leeds, and the basic concept (a central bay, displaying mobile broadband/laptops, and defined areas for Virgin Media products, mobile content, games and games consoles) will be replicated across its estate in due course.

The Carphone Warehouse new business and multichannel director Andrew Brem (pictured) says: “We have taken more than 10 per cent of the laptop market and hope to increase this figure further.

“We haven’t determined how much we want to increase it by as a percentage share, but we want to do what we did with mobile phones and make as many connections as we can.”

Full article in Mobile News issue 427 (November 17, 2008).

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