How BBC bruiser turned into BT's Mr Calm

SIR Christopher Bland is known as a bit of a bruiser. So when the BT chairman sees the share price fall after announcing a 56% rise in profits, you would expect him at least to be kicking the furniture.

Not a bit of it. Sitting in his ninth-floor office overlooking St. Paul's Cathedral, Bland is all sweetness and light. After all, the phone giant's earnings are back above £1,000 a minute for the first time since the dotcom boom went bust.

'Chief executive Ben Verwaayen and I had a chat about the likely reaction about a week ago. This is exactly what we expected - below 200p,' he says. The problem is that the market takes BT's profits for granted again.

His sang-froid comes as a bit of a surprise. When he was chairman at the BBC he had a reputation as a tough customer and is said to have told one journalist: 'You're too fat and ugly to waste time on.' But his prowess as a former

fencer suggests subtlety as much as forcefulness. He captained the Oxford fencing team and went on to represent Ireland in the 1960 Rome Olympics.

Now he prefers the more gentle pursuit of angling. He says that forced to choose between a trout stream and battling a salmon, he would take the smaller fish.

'Using a dry fly in a Hampshire chalk stream is a more delicate art than standing with a 16-foot pole in an Alaskan river,' he says.

Such is his love of angling that on the Desert Island Discs radio programme last year, Bland, 65, chose a two-and-a-half mile stretch of that Hampshire stream as his luxury item.

While the former Army officer is pleased with the shape of today's BT, he sees big challenges ahead - and relishes them. Since he took over from the long-serving Sir Iain Vallance in 2001, Bland has overseen a root-and-branch restructuring, the demerger of the group's mobile division, slashed debt from more than £30 billion to less than £9 billion, rebuilt the balance sheet, revamped the board and galvanised the staff.

He dismisses all this merely as 'Phase One', then takes self-effacement a little further: 'It wasn't really rocket science. Everyone could see pretty clearly what needed to be done.'

BT still faces competitive threats. Rivals such as Charles Dunstone's Carphone Warehouse and Tesco are launching consumer services using BT's own lines.

'I think competitors will find it harder than they think,' Bland says. 'Energy supplier Centrica, which is a good business, has found it very hard to do telecoms,' he points out.

And Bland is pleased to hit back at his rivals. On Dunstone: 'Charles punches above his weight in decibel terms.' And Tesco: 'I think that BT can defend itself against grocery chains.

'In fact,' he says dryly, 'we're going to start small stores in every phone box in the country.'

He becomes serious when the topic of BT's growth is raised. 'The market wants to see a new wave of income,' he says. 'We will not convince it by talking about how we'll get it, but by doing it - and we already are.

'New business has already grown from £600 million to £700 million, which is pretty impressive.'

Bland says BT has a series of businesses that will deliver the growth investors want. Firstly, it is back in the global game providing full communication services to major companies and governments following the unwinding of the disastrous Concert joint venture with AT&T. Concert included both companies' international networks and businessess.

Things will be different this time, Bland promises. 'Concert was a bad partnership. The two sides worked together best when they were unwinding the arrangement. If only the same effort had been put into building it up,' he laments.

Then there is broadband. Bland is delighted that the company hit its target of signing one million high-speed internet customers by the middle of the year.

He admits that the next stage - to have signed five million customers by 2006 - will be tougher. 'To get more customers, we have to rely on new services coming through which do not yet exist,' he says.

Bland thinks that online gaming and music downloads and possibly some form of video-on-demand will prove the engine for growth.

'Wouldn't it be nice if some application just came along and swept all before it, like text messaging did for mobiles,' he muses, 'but we can't rely on that.'

Bland opened a third front last week with the announcement that the company is moving back into the highly competitive consumer mobile market with a service to be carried on Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile network in Britain.

There are big risks in all Bland's strategies. But he insists he has no thought of backing away.

'I will be here a few more years,' he says. 'It is starting to get really interesting.'