Jim Armitage: Dido survives but TalkTalk boss can’t afford another slip

TalkTalk’s Dido Harding survived calls for her head after last year’s hackathon. New figures suggest her survival was justified.

Despite the controversy about its treatment of customers at the time, the punters don’t seem to have left in such catastrophic numbers as you’d expect. “Churn” — the percentage of those leaving — is actually at an all-time low.

But another slip and Harding will be toast.

TalkTalk warned on profits twice in 2015 even before the hack attack and, while the next crisis may not be as dramatic as IT infiltration by spotty teenagers, threats to future earnings abound.

As analysts at brokers Haitong point out, TalkTalk’s accounting methods could be masking nasties. For starters, it has a habit of not including its annual restructuring costs in its headline profit numbers, and the effect of new revenues from acquisitions is hard to isolate from the underlying business.

Externally there’s static on the line too. Ofcom looks willing to allow retail prices to rise if it means phone companies will invest in updating our ultrafast networks. For a company like TalkTalk largely marketing on price, that doesn’t sound good.

Harding may have survived the hack, but she can’t relax yet.