Lyca Mobile Warns up to 90 Percent of UK Staff Could Lose their Jobs
Troubled mobile operator Lyca Mobile, which is a virtual operator (mvno) on EE’s network, has reportedly told its UK workforce that the company is facing some “pretty serious challenges” and as a result of that almost 90% of their workers (up to 316 jobs) could be made redundant.
Over the past couple of years’ the operator has certainly faced its fair share of “serious challenges“. For example, there was last year’s cyberattack (here), as well as the conviction of Lyca’s French entities for money laundering and VAT fraud (the operator is appealing against that), and a Tax Tribunal recently ruled in HMRC’s favour over a £51m (aggregate) dispute related to the VAT treatment of customer “bundles” (here). Not to mention issues with the auditing of their accounts (here) and some other things.
According to The Guardian, the company’s general counsel, David Dobbie, warned staff on Friday (13th.. of course it was) that more than 300 of them could face the chop due to issues such as competition, cost inflation, “legacy technology issues” and internal inefficiencies due to overlap between divisions based in the UK and India. No mention is said to have been made of their tax dispute.
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The newspaper claims that the operator’s customer service team will also be impacted, which will see Lyca Mobile moving its support offshore to places such as India. “This proposed expansion of global service centres is going to unlock significant cost savings for us,” he said, while allegedly asking for the support of staff to “make this no harder than it needs to be”.
Cuts are also expected to be felt across other parts of the group, such as in property, media and their restaurant chain, Bella Cosa.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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It means, that Vectone’s case is gonna to be repeated, but on much LARGER scale.
There will be also some huge problems, on other MVNOs like eg. Slice Mobile…
Interesting times ahead!
This happened the last time when lyca was on T-Mobile, couldn’t pay its bills and got booted off the network
Wonder how many of those redundancys are going to be in the boardroom
Odd that the reasons given for financial distress don’t include the French money laundering conviction or the HMRC tax shenanigans.
Good riddance. I signed up to these lot about 6 months before they got hacked, and the scam and phishing emails I’ve been getting have been through the roof. Sad for the staff, but having a call center in London seems ridiculous for such a low-margin business.
If you are throwing numbers of 90% around, you can’t be far from winding up. Thats not even a skeleton crew providing support.
In fairness, it’s 90% of *UK* jobs – most roles are being moved overseas, not abolished.
Most of these jobs can be outsourced to Eastern Europe, the Middle East especially Turkey (seen some very good Turkish hires recently within my current employer. India of course and the Philippines. With Latin America if they need follow the sun support. The wage cost there will be 30-50% lower than the UK but still high quality staff on very good local wages. I would imagine a very small management team of sales, marketing and supplier relations left in the UK.
And Awful audio quality when the link from the UK to the remote ‘call centre’ gets busy – just how many calls can they ‘squash’ down a VoIP pipe?
One half of the brother was the owner of Vectone which collapsed doesn’t surprise me.
I’d be jumping ship if I was with them. Sounds like the writing is on the wall, port your number out now before you lose it!
Pretty sure if your number is from the Lyca Mobile block range then you will lose it even if you ported out.
Getting abnout 7.1gbp per subscriber per month to reach revenues of 145m/yr. A huge simplification, but is competition so stiff they couldn’t raise prices a couple pound p/mo…?
I mean as MVNOs go they are right down there with the worst of them, maybe even at the bottom (opinion). Service is garbage, CS is garbage. Needed to switch phones with them and move my eSim and their way of doing it was paying for a new line then moving the number across. Ported out when they told me that. Went to a far less sucky network.
They got hacked while I was there and I started to see weird transactions in my bank account.
I’m sure there are good people working at Lyca and I have a lot of sympathy for them if they lose their jobs. It’s also a makor concern if people risk losing their numbers. However,it would be best for everyone if Lyca went out of business as quickly as possible, rather than slowly drag their customers and staff down with them.
Maybe Ofcom might even be motivated to finally sort out the UK’s mess of a porting system.
Worst network ever. My partner was with them with no issues until they had the outage. His billing was during the outage and they didn’t collect it
A week later we were in the middle of nowhere and I asked him to call ahead to his sister to say we’d be 30 minutes away and when he called, he got a message saying he had no credit on his account. It was their fault there was no credit
Ported his number the next day to a spare sim I had on Giffgaff that had credit on it
They have UK staff? First I heard of it
Its amazing isnt it, no doubt all but the leaders, who missmanged the plot, get ‘disposed of’ such a ballance of rewardand accountability. So very typical of corporates and the UK, you’d think by now that directors etc would be struck of from being allowed to directors anywhere else for many years, less they inflict their administrations on another set of ’employees’.