Phones 4u stores deal will save Staffordshire and Black Country jobs
The jobs of more than 50 Phones 4U staff in the Black Country and South Staffordshire have been saved after EE and Vodafone stepped into buy some of the stores.
EE is buying stores in Walsall, where seven people are employed; West Bromwich, home to five workers, and Bilston, six.
It has also taken on stores in Birmingham Bull Ring, Acocks Green and Northfield, where another 27 work.
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Vodafone is taking stores in Wolverhampton, which has 21 staff; Stourbridge, five and Cannock, eight, along with two in Birmingham employing 43.
Vodafone paid £12.4 million for Phones 4U's interest in leasehold properties and its in-store inventory.
Dixons Carphone has already said it will take on the 800 staff who worked at 160 Phones 4U sites within Currys/PC World stores.
EE said the stores and 359 employees will be transferred with immediate effect and the stores will eventually be re-branded. It is planned that most will be opened in the next week.
With buyers only interested in the store estate, PwC has restructured the Phones 4U Newcastle-under-Lyme offices in order to cut costs. This resulted in 628 redundancies among head office and telesales staff on Friday.
There are still 3,000 jobs and more than 300 stores at risk following the deals with Vodafone, EE and Dixons Carphone.
PwC said last week that three parties were interested in buying the retailer's standalone store estate, with two of the bidders likely to have been EE and Vodafone.
Staffordshire entrepreneur John Caudwell, who set up the operation in the 1980s before selling it for £1.5 billion in 2006, called the behaviour of the networks 'extremely callous, extremely ruthless'.
EE and the other network operators were accused of a 'co-ordinated attempt to kill off' the retailer after their failure to renew new contracts left the company with no option but to call in administrators.
Vodafone said it rejected any suggestion that it behaved inappropriately during its negotiations with Phones 4U and indicated that the private equity-owned firm's debt repayment schedule hampered the discussions.
However, this was rejected by BC Partners in a statement last week.
EE said its decision not to renew its contract, which ran until September 2015, was in part driven by uncertainty over the long-term viability of Phones 4U. Its decision triggered the collapse of Phones 4U as it left the retailer without a single network partner.
