When COVID-19 hit the world and governments and authorities enforced restrictions on the society, the whole economy trembled. The telco business was affected, but the change in movement and usage patterns didn’t just bring negatives. Although the high margin mobile roaming revenue was lost, mature market telcos have, generally speaking, never reported higher margins than what they did in the just-closed third quarter of 2020.
We’ll show you what the key to this margin increase is.
Which are the equipment sales models in mobile and how have they developed over time? Can best practices be spotted when comparing equipment sales and profitability for a large number of mature market operators globally?
Using facts: What outputs are different equipment sales models such as subsidy, instalment, leasing, rental and BYOD generating – and how is an early upgrade promise affecting?
In this project we identified and documented a few operator best practices across different models in different markets.
Nowhere else in the world will you find as many 5G users as in South Korea. Nowhere else will you find as many 5G base stations up and running. If there ever was a race to 5G, the Korean government and industry won it.
Seeing is believing: After having dug up, read and compiled all reporting and data on Korea’s mobile business there was no other way forward than to seeing it for ourselves and interview people involved in creating Korea’s ‘5G wonder’.
We spent eight busy days (11-18 July) in Seoul to finish a comprehensive 106-page analysis – full of graphs and photos – with recommendations for European operators.
Mobile operators are abandoning the previously predominant model to subsidize handsets and to, in return, lock customers in on long contracts with elevated service fees.
The death of the model should be mourned by no one since end-users have been given choice and flexibility through a multitude of non-binding, cheaper and flexible service options with generous – or even unlimited – allowances. Operators have seen customer churn decrease as end-users hold onto their handsets longer. As a direct consequence, EBITDA margins have increased.
The fourth quarter has traditionally been the most difficult for mobile operators in mature markets. Many customers join, but many others are leaving and operators typically dilute margins by having more equipment (and more expensive equipment) in the sales mix compared to the rest of the year.
Subscriber acquisition and retention costs are generally higher in the fourth quarter when the financial discipline of mobile operators is put aside to promote equipment at prices well below the operator purchase costs – as long as existing customers promise to stay or new customers are ready to commit to plans with high monthly fees.
But even though there are temporary setbacks, our industry is gradually moving in a more rational direction: Equipment subsidisation is less frequent today and many operators have stopped binding customers to long, inflexible, contracts. Mobile operators have developed their service offerings and are today capable of explaining why customers should stay – without having to throw in a new iPhone as part of the package. Continue reading 2016 was a great year for mobile customer loyalty→
Nonstop Retention® benchmark: Calculating and comparing the Nonstop Retention Index for mobile brands (MNOs, sub-brands and main MVNOs) in one specific major European market. Identifying best practice and showing current trends. Recommending propositions and actions to improve customer loyalty per brand.
The four largest wireless carriers in the US – Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint – all claim that they have (essentially) abandoned the two-year-binding-contract-with-subsidized-phone model.
At least in the consumer market; the model is still around in the business market.
Mid November last year, T-Mobile USA launched its 10th uncarrier initiative, Binge On. It has been the most controversial uncarrier launch so far.
Why? Binge On zero-rates commercial video services – so that T-Mobile customers can watch as much as they like without emptying their data bucket. The trade-off? Video streams are slowed down to about 1.5 Mbit/s which means that image quality suffers – which is visible, but perhaps not on smaller screens like smartphones and tablets. Continue reading 34 petabytes of zero-rated video streamed since launch of Binge On→
Measure, compare and improve competitiveness within telecoms
When Canning Fok, the co-managing director of 