Telecom Growth Will Tilt to Business Segment in Coming Years

Though many of us expect enterprise customers will drive incremental 5G revenue growth (because of internet of things), business segment revenue was moving to the forefront even before observers predicted IoT would emerge as the key driver of incremental revenues.

To be sure, business segment revenues arguably have driven telecom service provider profits for many decades. But Bain and company analysts predict that the percentage of total revenue will continue to tilt in the direction of business sources for the foreseeable future.

source: Bain and Company

How Much Can Mobile Operators Earn from IoT Connections?

Just how much revenue might mobile operators earn from connecting internet of things devices? It all hinges on volume. Mobile connections might generate monthly revenue of perhaps $1.50, while connections to specialized low power wide area networks might generate about 15 cents from each connection, per month, according to Analysys Mason.

Perhaps among the optimists, Analysys Mason believes mobile operator connectivity revenue could amount to as much as US$28 billion in 2025, about 14 percent of total potential IoT revenues.

source: Analysys Mason

By way of comparison, application revenue will constitute 61 percent of total value chain revenue and hardware will generate 25 percent. So up to 86 percent of IoT revenue will be earned by app and device/infrastructure suppliers.

LPWA networks (such as LoRa, NB-IoT and Sigfox) might reach US$22 billion in total value by 2025. Connectivity revenue might generate eight percent of the total revenue from the LPWA value chain.

source: analysysmason.com

source: ABI Research

Spectrum Abundance Will Bring More Private Mobile Networks

The mobile business always has relied on its access to licensed spectrum as the foundation of its revenue model. Spectrum scarcity, among other elements, has shaped the business model in fundamental ways.

That is not unusual. Many industries rely on relative scarcity to create value that can be monetized. In the internet era, such scarcities also create incentives for innovators to attack.

If one assumes spectrum scarcity will in the future be replaced by spectrum abundance, it is inevitable that disruptors will enter the market. In many cases, those disruptors will be “former customers.”

Look to the undersea capacity business for clear examples of how this will work. In the past, enterprises generally have purchased communications services from communications service providers.

Of course, since the 1980s, it has been possible for enterprises to create their own virtual networks. In some cases, at least portions of such networks could be created on a “owned facilities” basis.

Source: Dean Bubley

That has taken the form of ownership of actual fibers within third party cables, in some cases taking the form of owned point-to-point microwave facilities and in other cases rental of wavelengths.

If you assume orders of magnitude more communications spectrum will be released in the future, it is logical to assume that many enterprises might evaluate the creation of private networks, for a variety of purposes.

Creation of multi-tenant indoor mobile networks is one application. Such “neutral host” facilities would offer “inside the venue” access to all mobile operators, on a for-fee basis. Think about the Boingo business model, or any standard roaming agreement, and you get some idea of how value is created: the mobile operator or enterprise gets access in hard to reach places.

Also, in the same way that enterprises have created their own computing networks, so all the new spectrum and protocols can enable private enterprise mobile networks, especially to cover campus locations, support industrial, medical or other internet of things networks.

That is going to remove some amount of potential business from the public markets. Again, look at the undersea capacity markets. Some enterprise customers (Google, Facebook, others) now find that have so much volume that they can build and operate their own global networks.

That essentially removes sales opportunity from the “public” markets. On trans-Pacific routes, such private networks already have removed as much as a third of demand from the market. On routes between North and South America, private networks carry as much as 70 percent of total traffic.

Something like that is possible in the mobile business, as enterprises use the bounty of new spectrum to create their own private networks. The only issue is how extensive the trend might eventually become.

In some cases, the private networks arguably will mostly have the same business function as Wi-Fi, which is to say there will be little negative impact on suppliers of access services.

Access to the cloud still will be necessary, but the private location-based mobile networks will take the place of Wi-Fi.

In some cases, such as neutral host facilities, mobile service providers will substitute services spending for capital investment to build their own in-building networks.

The clearest winners for such new private networks will be software, hardware and device suppliers. Again, Wi-Fi infrastructure provides some guidance. If internet of things connectivity becomes as big a deal as many expect, that revenue generation by devices, software and transmission hardware will be key.

source: analysysmason.com

Will Valuation of Telcos Fall?

Something new is happening in the global mobile business. Facing financial distress, entities tend to sell themselves. But what happens if potential buyers simply see such dire circumstances that a purchase does not make sense?

That appears to be a danger for Oi, the bankrupt Brazilian former incumbent. Inability to merge or sell has been an issue for Reliance Communications in India, as well.

So the new trend that bears watching is whether business conditions might get so severe that a struggling service provider cannot sell itself, because there are not willing buyers.

In other cases, such as the proposed T-Mobile US acquisition of Sprint, no acquisition premium has been proposed, as normally would happen. In other words, the buyer sees little reason to pay any premium.

All those situations--no takeover premium; no ability to entice a buyer or no ability to arrange a merger--suggest that the value of telecom assets is in some growing number of cases in danger of falling.

Whether that value can fall so far that complete shut down (liquidation) is the only available option is among the questions that must now be asked.

If that starts to appear in numerous markets, the logical consequence will be that equity values of most telcos will start to fall. That is a significant new business problem, in addition to revenue growth, profit margins, falling average revenue per account, competition and growing capital investment or operating cost issues.

A half century ago, the idea that a country’s national telecom provider could go bankrupt likely was seen as highly unlikely. Since all telecom companies were “sole provider” government-owned entities or monopolies, a bankruptcy, one would have argued, would imperil the national economy and therefore would be prevented by government intervention.

In the competitive era, we have become accustomed to the idea that smaller and competitive service providers indeed can go out of business. But there have been few examples of tier-one, former-incumbent service provider bankruptcies.

That now has happened, as Oi, the former incumbent in Brazil, has entered bankruptcy, albeit the more-familiar “restructure to stay in business” variety, not the “going completely out of business” version of bankruptcy.

Under the best of circumstances, a firm attempting such a gambit would wipe out its equity holders, restructure its debt and try again. In other cases, a buyer might be sought. It is not clear whether any buyers exist for Oi, some would argue.

The problem is the seemingly-unstoppable decline in the legacy fixed network business, which obliterates the contribution made by Oi’s mobile business.

Like many other markets, Brazil’s mobile market features four strong contenders, a situation many would say leads to depressed profits, as beneficial as that level of competition might be for consumers.

Though it is possible to envision a stable oligopoly, a mobile market with four roughly equally-matched suppliers is not sustainable, many would argue. Eventually, consolidation that creates a clear leader, with at least one strong follower, is probably necessary to sustain long-term profitability in the market, as that situation discourages uncontrollable price competition.

In principle, oligopolies are the likely “normal” market structure in the capital-intensive telecom business. In the mobile business, the key question now is whether “three” contestants is stable and sustainable, or whether even that is too many, in some markets.

Oi has nearly 19 percent share. Vivo, the market leader, has nearly 29 percent market share. TIM has 26 percent share, while Claro has 25 percent share. The “perfectly stable” market structure might have something approaching a 50-25-13 market share structure (plus or minus five share points for each contestant).

With such a structure, no provider has huge incentive to launch destructive pricing wars to gain share, as the other contestants can be expected to simply respond, depressing prices and profits across the board, without changing market structure.

source: Anatel

AT&T Shifts to Next Wave of Revenue Growth

It you are familiar with the concept of the product life cycle, you know that "nothing lasts forever."

Applied to the telecommunications business, that means we should see evidence that lead revenue drivers have changed over time, and predict that further change is coming.

At first, revenue growth comes as subscriptions grow. Then growth is driven by customers who buy "more" services (both additional services and quantity of such services).

For the past several decades, global growth has been driven primarily by consumer subscriptions to mobile services. When accounts are saturated, growth shifted to minutes of use, then messaging, then mobile internet access.

That remains the likely pattern in many developing markets, where account saturation has not yet been reached. But the principle remains: lead revenue sources have changed several times in the history of telecommunications, from account growth to long distance to mobility; consumer to business lead growth and back again; with periods where mobile growth was driven by accounts, then voice usage, then messaging and now mobile internet access.

Consider AT&T, whose growth, at a high level, shifted from fixed network services to mobility, but whose next wave of growth will be fueled by content services. After the acquisition of Time Warner’s content-producing assets, entertainment will be the second-biggest producer of AT&T revenues.

While business solutions (mobile and fixed) will be the largest single revenue segment, entertainment will be second at perhaps $65 billion, with consumer mobility third at $35 billion or so.

AT&T’s moves suggest it believes further revenue growth is not going to come from consumer mobility, even if that had fueled decades of incremental revenue leadership. With accounts now saturated--virtually everyone who wants to use mobility now does--revenue growth has to come from selling more things to mobile and other customers, or convincing customers to buy in larger quantities.

You see the limitations of the “increase quantity” strategy clearly in the use of “unlimited usage” plans for domestic voice, messaging and internet access. AT&T and the other leading mobile operators are not paid more when customers use more.

The “growth by acquisition” trend seemingly will be unchallenged over the next decade, as acquisitions have contributed most of the growth in developed markets since about 2000.

The bigger trend is the shift away from “mobility” as the revenue growth driver. Once the driver of industry and firm growth, even mobility has reached the peak of its product life cycle. New sources, with equivalent scale, must now be found. In the near term, entertainment content is one answer. Tomorrow, it is likely to be enterprise services supporting internet of things.

source: Business Insider

In fact, the firm projects a five-year EPS growth rate of nearly eight percent, with a majority of the growth fueled by the Time Warner content operations. .

There have been waves of growth in the telecommunications business over the last 50 years, and in many developed markets, signs of a peak already are in place. In Western Europe, revenue growth now is negative, and has been for some years.

It will be some time before hard decisions must be taken by executives and firms in many developed markets where mobile accounts and revenue still are growing, if at lower rates than has been the case over the past couple of decades.

What the AT&T acquisition of Time Warner shows is that, in the U.S. market, the era of consumer mobility has reached its limit.

Early 5G Business Cases Will be Tough

Tough revenue models are an underappreciated element of the 5G business case. It is easy to toss around notions that the three big buckets of opportunity are mobile broadband for humans; low-latency services and massive internet of things apps.

The problem is that it seems increasingly likely that each potential use case has competition. For enhanced mobile broadband, 4G keeps getting better. As it does, it limits the value proposition for 5G mobile internet access.

Likewise, as important as massive IoT might be, 4G alternatives also are coming to market, and even for low-latency applications, 4G is making improvement in that area as well.

The point is that we might well find, in the early going, that there is not as much incremental revenue from 5G as might be hoped.

In other words, as important as internet of things and services for non-humans are likely to be for mobile operator revenue models, IoT connectivity revenue is likely to be disappointing for most mobile service providers.

Of a total of US$227 to US$581 billion in total IoT revenue in 2020, perhaps $10 billion to $29 billion will be earned by supplying connectivity services. That represents something between four percent and five percent of industry revenues.

Most of the upside will come from devices, security services, applications and platform services.

sources: IDC, GSMA, Gartner, John Kjellemo

For some of us, that points out the possible importance of fixed wireless services as an early driver of 5G revenues. In some markets, where there is high demand for fixed broadband connections, but where there also are some challenging gigabit access deployment scenarios, 5G fixed wireless might be the clearest, most tangible new revenue stream to reach any scale. 

Until quite recently, though stand-alone fixed wireless networks have proven to have a positive business model for wireless internet service providers, in many cases,  mobile networks have not been effective substitutes for fixed service to the same extent.

Neither average or peak mobile specs, nor the cost of using mobile data have been anywhere close to comparable to fixed network specs or prices per consumed megabyte.

In fact, fixed network data costs, on a cost-per-megabyte basis, routinely have been in the 20 times to 60 time lower scale than mobile data. Where fixed network data might cost cents per gigabyte, mobile data costs dollars per gigabyte.

source: Mobile Experts

Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) will prove an important break, in that regard, by offering access speeds more equivalent to fixed networks, at costs more equivalent as well.

In South Africa, internet service provider Afrihost has created LTE-A usage plans that feature a cost-per-gigabyte of about 18 cents per gigabyte.

For many accounts, that is comparable to the value of a fixed network connection.

source: Afrihost

Traditionally, mobile and fixed network access have been highly different in their consumption modes, so the new plans are important in that they move in the direction of unified plans with a “mobile” or “per device” character instead of a per-location character.

In some markets, for example, monthly usage allowances for a fixed internet access connection might be in the neighborhood of 300 gigabytes. The new Afrihost plans support that amount of usage, for the biggest usage plans, per device.

Why Dumb Pipe is So Hard to Avoid

One might argue--based on history--that many firms and segments within the telecom ecosystem should not try and “move up the stack” (occupy new roles within the ecosystem), while some firms and segments have no choice but to try and do so.

One line of argument it that such moves are highly risky, and rarely succeed. That is true for any large firm, and not specific to the telecom industry.

A second set of arguments is that, in some parts of the ecosystem, the core business is, in fact, dumb pipe, and cannot easily be augmented or changed. That might well be nearly-completely true in the trans-ocean capacity business, arguably much less true in other retail parts of the business.

Consider return on capital, which for a telco might be seven percent (or less) on invested capital. App providers can earn 28 percent returns. In other cases, where marketplaces can be created to connect asset owners and customers directly, ROIC can be as high as 112 percent.

Source: Sanjay Kamat, Bell Labs

A final set of arguments might simply deal with the cost of such moves, weighed against other competing needs for capital, the impact on debt loads and the costliness of such assets, when purchased with telco currency (equity market valuations of telco buyers and app sellers).

To begin with, there is substantial evidence that all large acquisitions are difficult, and often fail to bring the hoped-for advantages. In fact, KPMG has argued that as many as 83 percent of mergers and acquisitions fail on one or more dimensions. Other studies suggest failure rates range between 70 percent and 90 percent.

A tier-one service provider, operating at scale, likewise needs scale even in its new business ventures, so such risks are nearly impossible to avoid.

Telco executives who actually have tried various means to occupy new roles, with new revenue models and revenue streams, know just how difficult this is to accomplish. On the other hand, they also know that amassing scale by making horizontal acquisitions (buying other service providers) most often does work, at least temporarily, in building scale, gaining efficiencies and growing gross revenue and possibly profit margins as well.

At a cultural and skills level, such efforts to create new roles within the ecosystem necessarily mean moving outside a self-understood “area of core competency.” At a practical level, this almost always happens by means of acquisition, since it is hard to gain measurable revenue impact when investing in a startup, or any other small firm, no matter how promising.

It is harder to evaluate the argument that moves “up the stack” into new roles within the ecosystem might well be impossible for some actors. It always is harder for small firms, undercapitalized firms and firms operating in smaller revenue niches.

Much of the reason is the cost of such moves (taking on debt, diluting a currency, buying a high market multiple asset with a low market multiple currency).

Telcos have a problem in that regard, as equity markets apply a low multiple of revenue to telco revenue, and a higher multiple of revenue to application (over the top) assets.

source: Kleiner Perkins

The point is that moving into new roles within the telecom, internet or business ecosystem is risky and expensive, when it is possible at all. So for many actors, if a particular role in the ecosystem becomes relatively less attractive, horizontal acquisitions, and then harvesting assets until an asset sale can be managed, is the logical strategy.

In a contracting industry, which the telecom industry already has become, in some markets, consolidation therefore becomes inevitable, as does profit margin pressure. In some instances, we must hope, at least some  tier-one providers will make a successful move into adjacent roles in the ecosystem, offering not only new revenue sources and different business models, but also higher profit margins.