There are some unstated maxims for connectivity businesses where it comes to revenue growth. As for many other consumer products, the core revenue model is built on units sold and price per unit.
When, in a single market, few have subscriptions, the growth strategy is “get more subscribers.”
When subscriber adoption is high in any single market, the growth strategy often is “get new subscribers in other countries.”
When that is deemed infeasible for any reason, the logical revenue growth strategy is either “take market share from other suppliers” or “change the value proposition so we can charge higher prices.”
Only when none of those strategies seems to work will connectivity businesses ever seriously consider shifting the business model and moving into adjacencies and taking on additional roles in the ecosystem.
At some point, as markets saturate, “get more subscribers” will become a challenging strategy, with more effort shifting to “get higher prices.” Only at some future point, when neither of those strategies is working very well, will connectivity providers willingly and seriously look at ways to leverage additional roles in the ecosystem in meaningful ways.
In the meantime, there is some opportunity to do so in the internet of things and edge computing markets, for example, even if the primary revenue upside is likely to be found in the traditional “add more subscribers” area. Higher average revenue per unit sold is unlikely to be higher than mass market ARPU for either IoT or edge opportunities, though.
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