Carphone Warehouse is bustin' out all over

NEWS Carphone Warehouse has splashed out £54m on French telecoms CRM company CMC and reported soaring annual profits. Charles Dunstone, chairman and CEO of Carphone, said: "This is the start of our aim to develop a full Pan-European telecoms service operation." CMC will be bundled in with Carphone's telecoms services division, which saw turnover treble this year to £30.5m. CMC manages 620,000 customers for France Telecom and other French operators, it also has three call centres. Carphone has been expanding out of its core mobile sales business for two years. Its Mviva mobile internet operation, launched last June, now has 292,000 registered customers and 200 content partners across Europe. Earlier this month it announced a joint deal with the Financial Times to set up FT Mobile. Carphone's retail airtime business jumped to £649.3m from £504.5m last year with the growth coming from both subscriptions and pre-pay sales. The company's mobile sales business boomed to a £1.08bn turnover, compared to £685.5m last year. Excluding wholesale deals, margins were 33 per cent. The company has over 1,000 stores in Europe. Group turnover was up 59 per cent to over £1.1bn and pre-tax profits up 60 per cent to £66m.