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Swisscom will merge Vodafone Italia with Fastweb, its Italian subsidiary, creating Italy’s largest mobile operator with a 28 per cent market share and a strong presence in the business market, according to Enders Analysis, the research provider.
And the company is still grappling with its flailing German business, which remains its largest market. Karen Egan, at research group Enders Analysis, said: 'The company is highlighting how well it is positioned to grow now without Italy and Spain, and with the prospect of a better position in the UK.
'Germany is more important than ever, and the jury is still out on that turnaround.'
“One thing that is certain is that Margherita Della Valle has delivered on the deal front having taken over as CEO less than a year ago,” Enders Analysis analyst Karen Egan said in a note on Friday. “If she can deliver on a change in structure and culture to the benefit of the operational performance as convincingly as she has done with dealmaking, then the Vodafone story really could start a very promising new chapter.”
The US is intent on preventing the CCP’s goal of AI supremacy by 2030, banning exports of advanced AI chips to Chinese companies. So far, these bans have largely been shrugged off to create a new commercial dynamic in the region.
Huawei wields a de facto monopoly on the manufacture and sale of advanced chips in China. Huawei also sells cloud services globally and threatens Apple's $70 billion in Chinese revenues through its premium handsets.
China’s AI regulation is highly supportive of the training and deployment of Chinese-language LLMs developed by tech platforms, startups, and device makers, with meaningful revenue gains only appearing by H2 2024.
Market revenue growth was solid at 1.6% in Q4, but subscriber volumes were weak, and ARPU was supported by price rises.
Price rises will be much lower in 2024, with no ease in sight for volume growth, which will likely lead to much lower or even negative revenue growth.
The altnets are adding significantly to incumbent pressure, and their consolidation may ease or worsen this depending on its form.
Vodafone has finalised its deal to sell its Italian business to Swisscom for €8bn, opting for greater regulatory certainty and higher upfront proceeds rather than a potentially higher offer from Iliad for an Italian JV.
The company has grasped the nettle on the trailed dividend cut, bringing the announcement forward from the expected May timing, and halving the payout.
The company is highlighting how well it is positioned to grow now without Italy and Spain, and with the prospect of a better position in the UK. Germany will be more important than ever in this growth equation.
The Government will enact a new ban on foreign states acquiring UK print news media, forcing Redbird IMI to end its pursuit of Telegraph Media Group (TMG).
The new law adds a further criterion to the regulatory scrutiny of media mergers on competition and public interest grounds, but there remain questions about its scope.
The new law will collide with the completion of Phase 1 of the regulatory process on public interest grounds by the Secretary of State (SoS), unless RedBird IMI surrenders.
Karen said "The company is highlighting how well it is positioned to grow now without Italy and Spain, and with the prospect of a better position in the UK."
“Germany is more important than ever, and the jury is still out on that turnaround.”
“Frankly, there is no one silver bullet platform,” says Abi Watson, senior media analyst at Enders Analysis. “There has been a huge proliferation of platforms and changes where people spend their time online.”
“Google’s monopoly over search is an obvious risk,” says Watson, while “longer-term risk of an AI-enabled search engine that cuts publishers out entirely is an existential risk.” Google has reportedly begun paying some smaller publishers to test an AI tool that lets them scrape other news sites’ content and aggregate it into a new article, a practice that a news industry executive called “potentially troubling.”
“The benefit of LinkedIn is that it has some aligned incentives with publishers. LinkedIn wants to become the centre of people’s online professional life, rather than a platform they visit during a job search,” says Watson.