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The regional newspaper business in the UK is a mature industry with improved operating management and a small number of powerful players.

The bulk of the report examines in detail the structural forces determining the growth of ISPs in Wanadoo's main territories - France and the UK. It looks at the scope for raising revenues through broadband growth, increased advertising or e-commerce revenues. We look at market shares, and the factors that drive growth and decline.

The charges imposed by the mobile operators for handling incoming calls are a very important part of their revenue stream. The UK telecoms regulator is attempting to force the networks to reduce their prices significantly. The row has just been referred to the UK competition authorities. We look at the arguments used by Oftel to justify its harsh stance. We conclude that the evidence supports the regulator's view that incoming call charges are held artificially high. As a result, analysts should expect that the UK networks will fail to see the charge cap reversed. The impact on revenue will be about 7% in the next four-year period. This will flow straight to the profit line. Increases in fixed to mobile call volumes, as a result of the lower prices, will partly offset this.

Wanadoo's aim of being the #2 broadband ISP in Europe (behind T-Online, way ahead) was adversely affected in Q1 2002 by the decision of the French Competition Commission to halt the marketing of the company's product through the network of France Telecom, so other ISPs can also have a chance to establish a foothold. Wanadoo has had to resort to other, more expensive, marketing platforms, and sales are running at about 70% of the pace before the decision. Wanadoo is also looking for a strong showing on broadband from Freeserve, just entering the market now: 70,000 broadband subscribers by year-end, and a quarter million by mid-2003. We are sceptical whether the brand can shake its reputation for cheap Internet service, which continues to attract a large PAYG base.

This report is a companion to Broadband Europe (2002-02), issued concurrently, and looks more closely at cable’s ability to compete with incumbents on marketing broadband. Key points include:

The outlook for the industry is further enhanced by the impact of much lower paper costs, allied with cost measures on print usage, and reduction in expenditure on online ventures. The industry is increasingly benefiting from best practice although anomalies remain in margins that indicate further room for improvement. Editorial investment has not alas managed to halt continuing slow declines in circulation that are inevitable in our opinion.

The potential for residential broadband connectivity in France, Germany and the UK depends on the availability of low-priced broadband products (hardware, installation and monthly subscriptions) and a narrow pricing gap with existing Internet access packages. Unless monthly subscriptions fall below €30 (from current comparable levels of €45 and up) and hassle-free self-installation is ubiquitous, consumers will not migrate from narrowband, even if they appreciate the faster surfing and download speeds of broadband. But regulators are guarding against any price declines from the incumbents, having put their faith in infrastructure-based competition through local loop unbundling (LLU) and upgrading of cable infrastructure. We believe that expectations of alternative supply of broadband through either of these routes in France and Germany are misplaced; in the UK, broadband cable will make more headway due to specific historical and regulatory factors, while there will be no effective alternative supply of residential DSL through LLU.

In its projections supporting its £3.2 billion debt financing, H3G projects 172,000 subs in 2002, 1.2 million by end 2003 and 9 million by end 2010.

Combined with projected ARPU of £40/month (or about current contract ARPU in the UK), H3G’s revenue projections come to £2 billion in 2005 (note UK mobile market in total = £10 billion today).

The flow of news about ITV is going from bad to worse. But we think that the market may have misunderstood the real story behind last week's bombshell that ITV viewing has fallen by 25% in a year. This figure could have been predicted from existing data.

15 million UK adults regularly (at least once a month) accessed the Internet from home in Q3 2001, the same as in Q2 2001. This stagnation is due to mainly seasonal factors and we expect growth of the home Internet population to be renewed in the autumn and winter.

Our lower forecasts are derived from an analysis of the numbers of households and small businesses that are apparently prepared to buy ADSL at current price levels, but also driven by concerns about this particular product. Users will have to acquire new email addresses and pay for a new email service. We do not think the product will work in networked multi-PC homes or offer ISDN users a real alternative. We see tremendous confusion in the marketplace from two competing BT Broadband offerings from BT Retail and BTopenworld.

This report is the first of a quarterly series by Toby Syfret, one of Europe's best known commentators on viewing trends.

We believe it will opt for the BBC offering. This note shows why.

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.