2014: The story so far
By Mary Lennighan, Total Telecom
Thursday 17 April 2014
M&A and executive changes have dominated the headlines in the past few months, but the readers of Total Telecom have a different idea of what makes a good story.
It has become as traditional as chocolate eggs and fluffy-tailed bunnies: as we approach the long Easter weekend in the U.K., Total Telecom takes stock of the year so far in the telecoms industry.
And the telecoms world really has been a hive of activity over the past four months. However, before we get into the nitty gritty of what we believe are the biggest stories 2014 has given us, we thought it would be interesting to examine what you, the readers of Total Telecom, have been focusing on.
So here are our top 10 stories of the past few months, based on the numbers of clicks on our Website:
1 EE subscribers demand compensation after network outage
2 Strength in numbers as Telecom Italia joins M2M group
3 Ofcom hails end of mid-contract price hikes
4 BT wins review of Sky's wholesale pricing policy
5 AT&T completes Leap Wireless deal
6 WhatsApp adds voice calling
7 Tata Group may exit telecoms industry
8 BT seeks new TV chief as Watson leaves
9 Softbank mulls Vodafone move
10 Vodafone hits out at damning UK network quality study
Given that we are based in the U.K. It is perhaps unsurprising that our readers were particularly interested in anything linked to mobile network quality in the country; many thousands of you read about EE's network outage last month, and a similar number clicked on the U.K. network quality report that turned out to be bad news for Vodafone.
But telecoms is a truly global industry, as evidenced by the breadth of locations covered in our top 10, from U.S. M&A news to fierce competition in India and expansionist ambitions in Japan.
It also comes as no surprise that WhatsApp's Mobile World Congress announcement of its plans to launch a voice service features among our most-read. The OTT messaging specialist's $19 billion acquisition by Facebook earlier in February was also named by the Total Telecom team as one of the biggest stories of 2014 to date.
It has already been a big year for M&A.
The WhatsApp deal, large as it was, pales into insignificance compared with Verizon's $130 billion purchase of Vodafone's stake in Verizon Wireless, which closed in February. Almost immediately the U.K. mobile operator ploughed some of that excess cash into Spanish cableco Ono, which it agreed to buy for €7.2 billion a month later.
Ono was not the only cable operator to go under the hammer this year. Liberty Global agreed a €10 billion deal for Netherlands-based Ziggo in late January, putting CEO Rene Obermann out of a job less than a month after he took the helm. And a fortnight later U.S. cable operator Comcast brokered a $45.2 billion mega-deal for smaller rival Time Warner Cable.
Vivendi's sale of mobile unit SFR drew our attention for several weeks, the French firm holding talks with Numericable while rival bidder Bouygues Telecom tabled bid after bid in the hope of securing the asset. Vivendi was unmoved, agreeing a €13.5 billion deal to merge Numericable with SFR in early April.
Google has been buying and selling recently, offloading Motorola Mobility to China's Lenovo for $2.91 billion in January and picking up home alarm maker Nest for $3.2 billion.
On a smaller scale, Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten agreed to acquire OTT voice and messaging firm Viber for $900 million; Verizon bought Cincinnati Bell's mobile business for $210m; and India's Bharti acquired smaller rival Loop Mobile in a deal believed to be worth 7 billion rupees (€83 million).
But one major industry deal did not happen as planned. Microsoft was due to close its €5.44 billion acquisition of Nokia's handsets business before the end of Q1, but with certain regulatory approvals in Asia still outstanding, in late March the companies were forced to push back the deadline. The go-ahead from China came a couple of weeks later, and we should see the deal completed sometime this month.
Microsoft got a new CEO in the shape of company insider Satya Nadella earlier this year, and it wasn't the only firm to experience a change in leadership.
Mozilla, developer of the Firefox browser and OS, has had a torrid time, appointing its co-founder Brendan Eich as its new CEO in March after the best part of a year under an interim leader, only to have Eich resign two weeks later amidst a storm of controversy over his opposition to same-sex marriage. This week the company named another interim CEO, its former CMO Chris Beard, who could find himself in the running for a permanent position.
Meanwhile, Belgacom started the year by appointing a new CEO, promoting Dominique Leroy from within the ranks. And there was a changing of the guard at Qualcomm, where Paul Jacobs handed over the running of the company his father formed to Steve Mollenkopf.
Also this year, the European parliament voted to protect net neutrality and to end roaming fees; the European Commission dropped its anti-dumping investigation regarding China's equipment vendors; Huawei was outraged when it emerged its products had been hacked by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA); Mexico moved to impose new asymmetric regulations on dominant telecoms and TV players America Movil and Grupo Televisa; Telefonica Digital disappeared as part of a restructuring by its Spanish parent; Vodafone brought mobile money service M-Pesa to Europe, launching in Romania; and New Zealand's Telecom changed its name to Spark.
Hopefully that whistlestop tour of 2014 to date has sparked some interesting memories. Due to the long weekend, we'll be taking a break until Tuesday, when we will be back bright and early with all the latest telecoms chat. See you then.
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