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Market revenue growth sunk back to -3% in Q4 from -2% in Q3, with further backbook pricing and lockdown effects to blame .
Backbook pricing will improve with numerous price increases announced, but these will only start to take effect in Q2 2021.
Demand for broadband and ultrafast looks promising, but will also take time to filter through to revenue, with Q1 again lockdown-affected.
Goods ecommerce accelerated in 2020 by four years above trend to reach 28% of retail sales (excl. fuels) from 19% in 2019. We anticipate that ecommerce in 2021 will remain in the same share range of 27-29%.
Food and drink grew faster than any online category in 2020, doubling to over 10% of associated sales. Aside from food and drink, the agony of zero sales on the shuttered high street continued, with over half of all sales being online in 2020, likely persisting in Q1 2021.
Offline retailing will recover due to deconfinement and the share of ecommerce will edge down in Q2 2021 and thereafter, but these new shopping habits will be sticky and anchored by persistent work-from-home, driving all retailers that are left standing to massively adopt online channels and associated advertising media.
Karen said Three “seems to be between a rock and a hard place — too small scale to earn a decent return and with a very challenging trajectory towards achieving the scale it needs to improve those returns."
James said “The most polite way of putting it is to say that the comments are slightly tenuous."
Alice said “That’s why the rebrand could be so important. They can say, ‘We have all of these great initiatives that we’re launching, but we need funding, and part of that funding comes from you, our members. Come join us in this mission.'”
Francois said “DAZN appears to be trying to double down on Italy in the prospect of their expected IPO. Sky is probably more relaxed than in the past about holding rights.”
The Telegraph’s carefully executed outsourcing of print advertising sales to Mail Metro Media fine-tunes its subscriber-first strategy.
Consolidation and collaboration are inevitable in a highly-competitive, structurally-shrinking news industry.
Reader-first models have emerged as the consistent theme for quality publishers, but the trade-offs, investment approaches and executions are highly differentiated.
Gill believes the £1.5bn target is bold, but added: “While it is notoriously difficult to make money out of kids programming, if the BBC happens to devise the next Peppa Pig, the return from merchandise could be huge."
She added “The BBC has a very strong brand globally, and if it could commercialise its audio output and/or news via a subscription service outside the UK there is potentially a large market. You could see people paying a few pounds a month to have access to Radio 4, for example, via BBC Sounds.”
Gill said GB News will "play impartiality in a different way." She predicts some shows may skew left, while others hew right, evening out the appearance of bias across the network. But all programs, she predicts, will revolve around opinionated individual commentators — a different dynamic on British television.
She added "For a new channel launching into this market that is not backed by an ITV, or a BBC or a Sky — how are you going to get an audience in the first place? That's going to prove incredibly difficult."