BBC audiences tune into Capita for another 9 years

(By Anthony Miller – Tuesday 4th August 2009 9:30am). The UK’s leading BPO player, Capita, will be relieving the BBC of another £45m over nine years as it extends its £54m/10-year deal to handle audience feedback for the broadcaster. This is another cracking win for Capita as the contract was retendered with 38 companies responding, and shows again how rare it is for Capita to fail to renew a major deal even when fiercely contested – and with seemingly little revenue attrition too. Capita has other contracts with the BBC including TV licensing and HR.

By the way, if you do the sums, this deal is at much lower revenue per employee than Capita’s average. In today’s release (see here), CEO Paul Pindar remarked that the BBC audience services contract employs around 200 staff and the renewal will generate some £5m p.a., i.e. £25K per employee. Capita employs 36,000 staff and last year generated £2.44b in revenues, i.e. £68K per employee. I guess deals like these are far more people-intensive than many of Capita’s other contracts, which means some must be really sweet!