Telecom New Zealand has provided a binding offer to Crown Fibre Holdings (CFH) in respect of the Crown's Ultra-fast Broadband (UFB) initiative, and has accelerated the reorganisation of its business. Under the proposal, Chorus would deliver an open-access, national, fibre-to-the-home network which would reach 75 percent of New Zealand within ten years. Furthermore, should Chorus be selected as the Crown's partner in the 25 regions remaining to be allocated, Telecom would move to structurally separate, subject to shareholder approval. The company also announced a number of organisational changes, which include reducing the executive team from ten to eight members. Mark Ratcliffe, who has led Telecom's UFB bid team, will now resume his role as CEO of the Chorus business unit, while retaining the lead on UFB matters with the Crown. Telecom will also align its Wholesale business with Chorus over the year ahead, in anticipation of regulatory change and demerger. As a first move, acting CEO of Wholesale, Nick Clarke, will continue to report directly to Paul Reynolds but will step back from Telecom Group issues and will stand down from the Telecom executive. A new executive role, Chief Product Officer, is created to improve the performance of product and pricing activity across the company with teams from Retail, Gen-i, commercial Wholesale and the entire TNZI business will move into this new business unit. Finally, Telecom's existing five corporate centre executives - finance, HR, strategy, legal and corporate relations - will reduce to three corporate services executive roles.
