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The UK Internet population continued to grow very slowly in the fall of 2001, reaching 14.7 million home users (30% adult penetration rate). Although this slow pace of customer growth may give dot.com investors pause for concern, we found some good news on e-tailing to report, such as higher numbers of purchasers - to almost 9 million - and positive experiences online that will lead to repeat shopping. Books, clothes, DVDs and computer games were especially popular items. Bricks-and-clicks e-tailers like WHSmith, Argos and John Lewis are well positioned to take advantage of offline/online marketing synergies, but Amazon (around 3 million unique visitors) is impressive in execution. Tesco has retained its very wide lead over other online supermarkets, almost doubling reach to 9% of home Internet users in 2001, and Argos is also doing well.

This note looks in detail at the reseller business model, and in particular for BT service providers taking over BT lines, where Oftel has just mandated a ‘wholesale line rental’ product. We think the small international call segment is unappealing for entry as competition is already fierce. The new entrant will also find it difficult to establish a foothold on the local and national calls segments where substitution of mobile telephony is draining any dynamism from the market. Even more ominous is the advantage the BT Together packages have given BT over resellers in the customer segment most likely to be aggressively marketed by stretchy brands: families making off-peak and weekend calls to family and friends.

Sky's continued excellent performance has attracted favourable comment in the weeks since its half yearly results. But much of the commentary missed some critical points. The analysts did not question Sky's assertions that it was successfully targeting high value customers. Actually, the last half-year saw a fall in the numbers taking the top-priced package. Similarly, few commentators noticed that despite the favourable comments in the results announcement, interactive revenues actually fell last quarter. The steepest rate of decline was seen in betting, which a year ago was going to be application that formed the core of Sky's interactive ARPU. Similarly nobody seemed to have noticed that Sky's overall share of TV viewing declined in the quarter, despite the addition of two hundred thousand new subscribers.

According to the Financial Times (27/03/2002), the European Commission is planning ‘to clamp down on the cost of calling mobiles’ and issue ‘tough new rules’, which ‘would make it easier for national telecoms regulators to force mobile phone companies to reduce excessive call termination charges’. According to our research, this is an exaggerated assessment: the likeliest outcome would be a Commission recommendation on ‘best practice’ guidelines, rather than new rules. Our research also shows that the pressures from NRAs on MNOs to lower mobile termination charges are highly uneven in the top three markets: they are most acute in the UK (predictably, given the pro-consumer orientation of Oftel), less significant but nevertheless present in Italy, and non-existent in Germany. Thus, if the UK Competition Commission endorses Oftel’s proposed charge cap in its forthcoming ruling, we can expect the four leading UK MNOs to lose about £880 million in revenues for the 2002-2006 period, with the annual reduction in 2002-2003 estimated at about £265 million.

The mobile operators in the UK and elsewhere probably make a higher margin on SMS than on any other product. We think that about 30% of a UK operator's gross margin in derived from SMS and the percentage is rising. This report asks the question 'why should mobile operators launch any other mobile data products aimed at consumers?'. SMS now generates about £800 per megabyte of traffic. GPRS prices fall to about £1 per megabyte to heavy users. We conclude that operators may say that they are focusing on new consumer data services, but the reality will be very different as they work to protect their golden goose. In the long run, we think that SMS is vulnerable to Instant Messaging services introduced onto networks by innovative third parties. (In the US, where SMS has not really taken off, and thus the operators have no profits to protect, these applications are already available on some GSM networks).

The survey showed the typical UK consumer expects to keep his or her phone an average of 39 months. The most likely reason for changing would that the owner's existing phone no longer works. Younger consumers will replace their phone much more swiftly than the average.

The painful restructuring process at NTL is probably well underway. Holders of NTL bonds will have to accept a significant reduction in the nominal value of their holdings. To us, the crucial question is how much debt the slimmed-down UK businesses of NTL can afford to have on the balance sheet. If everything goes right, the number is something over £3 billion. But things will not go right, and the underlying debt capacity of NTL is probably considerably less than a billion pounds.

As noted, TV viewing did indeed fall sharply in the first quarter. Viewership of the main analogue channel, ITV, fell faster. And this is not caused by multichannel competition. ITV's share has fallen fastest in analogue terrestrial-only homes. Sky has been a beneficiary, as have ITV2 and E4, the digital offspring of the main commercial channels.

This brief note concerns further evidence of strong price sensitivity to broadband prices, as provided by Oftel's recent qualitative research. Since we expect an announcement from BT Group on February 26th regarding reduction of DSL wholesale prices to levels consistent with retail pricing of £30/month or slightly less, this is topical. In addition, we point to BTopenworld's very high market share (75% plus) in residential DSL installations so far.

UK national newspapers are in poor shape. The inherent problem of the industry – too many papers chasing too few readers – has been exacerbated by a sharp decline in advertising revenue since September. As a result of these challenges coupled with the implications of forthcoming media legislation, we expect to see significant changes in newspaper ownership over the next two years.

The likely development of overall advertising in Europe in 2002 and 2003;

The development of overall online advertising in the same period;

Telewest has drawn away from its key competitor in terms of UK performance. However, we still believe Telewest's bonds are worth less than 50% of their face value. This note explains why.

In this note, we provide some evidence for this unpopular view. We look at BSkyB in the UK in the period from prior to the start of its digital service to today. We show four main points: (1) Digital TV has not resulted in digital viewers buying more channels or spending significant sums on pay-per-view. In fact the key 'pay-to-basic' ratio has fallen; (2) Sky's increased TV ARPU has resulted entirely from price increases in the various Sky packages, rather than increased purchasing; (3) The move to digital has caused a significant, and possibly permanent, deterioration in the costs of operating the Sky service. All the main categories of Sky's costs have risen as a percentage of turnover; (4) The ability to run more sophisticated interactive services on a digital platform has had little positive effect on Sky's economics. Though Sky disguises the costs attached to interactive services, it almost certainly loses money on this part of its activities.

This report explains why we are pessimistic about the short and medium term prospects of the global digital TV supply chain. While some recently published forecasts of digital TV penetration remain unremittingly optimistic, our own estimates suggest the number of digital homes may reach only 160 million by 2005. Not only are we bearish on demand but we find an industry that is concentrating on consolidation rather than unsustainable subscriber growth. Although some operators such as BSkyB are well on their way to profitability others face huge uncertainty over subscriber numbers and margins. But operator consolidation will not entirely solve the core issue facing the industry: that the current cost of an STB cannot be recouped by increased ARPU. To become profitable operators will require lower costs of content rights and STBs - and lower churn. These are all negative trends for the supply chain and will lead we believe to a 17% decline in global STB shipments during 2002 - a shortfall of 6m units over 2001. Furthermore due to declining average selling prices, we expect the STB market will not recover to 2001 value (approximately $7bn) until 2004.

lack of a price advantage over GPRS or 3G tariffs

a small base of prospective users

BT's direct access broadband product attracted a lot of attention last week. This note examines the likely scale of demand for the product over the next four years. We conclude that although the product does have a niche among sophisticated users, the number of prospective customers is very unlikely to exceed 1 million. BT forecasts several times this number.

We use this report to show that, while camera phones have been important in Japan, they have actually added very little to ARPU. Their primary effect has been to attract high spending customers to J-Phone, Japan's innovator in this area. The rate of uptake in Japan has been encouraged by highly subsidised handsets (less than or around €150 or £100), and very low prices for sending and receiving pictures (12 € cents or 8 pence each).