Sometimes Rolls sells more engines than spares and the financial markets panic. Last year the mix reverted to 50:50, which made everyone happy. Yet the next time the ratio worsens, as it inevitably will with so much new business being won, there is no need for dismay. Rolls is in it for the long-term and shareholders should adopt the same view.jeremy.warner independent.co.uk.

Ben Verwaayen, the chief executive of BT Group, will be waiting by his phone next week for an extremely important hospital call. His own health is not in question, as far as we know, but rather, the problem is the future health of BT itself. If everything goes to plan, Mr Granger will break the good news to Mr Verwaayen that BT has beaten off stiff competition from Cable & Wireless to win the NHS’s latest telecoms outsourcing contract, worth several hundred million pounds.The contract , to provide the NHS with a new high speed telecoms network for whizzing patient records and urgent telephone calls between hospitals and doctors’ surgeries, will be further proof that BT can look forward to a long and healthy life as a transformed telecoms company, fit to survive in the world of mobile phones and the internet.The fact that BT and Mr Verwaayen urgently need to win contracts was graphically underlined yesterday when the company unveiled its third-quarter results.Group turnover was down 2.6 per cent at £4.5bn. However, within that its traditional business revenues, such as fixed line, were down 6 per cent at £3.7bn. Group operating profits were down 2 per cent to £743m.Because of figures like these, Mr Verwaayen is trying to transform BT’s business from relying on traditional services to what it dubs “new wave” sources of income, namely broadband internet connections, mobile telecoms services and IT solutions for large companies and government organisations such as the NHS.The charts show how BT’s new wave turnover in quarter three rose a healthy 31 per cent to more than £800m, with its solutions and outsourcing business, BT Syntegra, growing the most. Broadband internet connections continued to rise and, as of 6 February, stood at 1.93m.But they also show how rapidly traditional turnover is falling and how gross margins in its retail business fell from £995m in the third quarter last year to £934m this year.Although BT is fighting hard to preserve as much of its traditional business as it can – in directory inquiries it has fought back from a collapsing market share, which fell from 65 per cent to 25 per cent but is now back at 40 per cent. Traditional business is shrinking and there is very little BT can do about it.After all, who makes a call these days when you can email? Likewise, who sends faxes anymore? And when you do decide to phone a friend you are just as likely to use your mobile as a fixed-line telephone.Even BT’s fixed-line business is under attack from alternative network operators who have been busy eroding BT’s traditional business for years thanks to deregulation.

The extra charge to financially distressed companies could in some cases push them over the edge, and in any case is bound to make them less inclined to sustain their final-salary pension schemes.The new Bill helps remove some of the red tape surrounding pensions as well as simplifying their treatment for tax purposes. Furthermore, for the first one or two years, the charge will be levied on a flat-rate basis, with the effect that the more solvent will be subsidising the less solvent, removing the incentive to keep schemes properly funded.In order to avoid the “moral hazard” of flat-rate levies, the Government envisages the eventual introduction of a risk-based approach, with employers running poorly funded schemes being charged proportionately more This hardly seems much better. On the contrary, it seems destined only to hasten the rush to closure.Besides setting up a new pensions regulator, the new bill seeks to protect workers where companies with under-funded pension schemes have gone bust by setting up an industry-wide pension protection fund. BT is having its lunch eaten from both ends of the table.”The lunch these people are eating is a very sober one,” said Mr Verwaayen, stressing how hard BT is working to manage the decline in its traditional business.”The transformation of our marketplace is accelerating and BT is driving that change by providing our customers with new technology and services with greater capabilities and lower cost,” he said.But life is rarely that simple. This is to be funded via a levy on all qualifying schemes, an extra cost which will further detract from the virtues of providing them. In the process, he’s taken ¤4bn out of costs, selling or closing 136 factories, all without the loss of a single day’s production. But it is not just as a hatchet man that Mr FitzGerald has left his mark.Perhaps curiously for someone who’s reduced the workforce by 52,000, Mr FitzGerald is genuinely liked by his staff, and he commands great loyalty among his senior executives.

Unilever wasn’t exactly slipping into the sea when he became chairman, but it would by now have been doing so but for the changes he managed to push through. He’ll be a hard act for the new man, Patrick Cescau, to follow.Pensions timebombThe mass extinction of traditional, final-salary pension schemes may already be an unstoppable phenomenon, but yesterday’s pensions bill ­ Simplicity, Security and Choice ­ will do nothing to slow the slaughter. The contrast with that other great Anglo-Dutch behemoth Royal Dutch Shell could hardly be greater.Most important of all, Mr FitzGerald has made Unilever into a company people feel proud to work for. Good corporate citizenship, sponsorship of the arts, reinvestment in the community, all these things have become as important to Unilever as the bottom line, indeed they are seen as an integral part of it.