VMO2 had another mixed quarter to end a difficult 2024, with revenue growth improving but EBITDA growth falling, and other metrics mixed at best.
The company hopes to put this behind it with guidance for both revenue and EBITDA growth in 2025, a tough ask given current momentum.
Ultimately achieving or exceeding this may depend on altnet pressure receding, which we expect it to do, but perhaps more towards the end of the year than the beginning.
Telcos are increasingly developing APIs to share selected network data with third parties, with the goal of supporting useful end-user applications.
Capabilities are still nascent, but the potential is real. Telcos need to adopt a pragmatic approach that looks to match API capabilities to useful products, and build increasing scale over time.
Security is the largest near-term opportunity for API products, but AI is the key emerging area, with telcos potentially able to play an ambitious role in providing APIs to help manage the growth of autonomous AI agents.
Vodafone has signalled a tougher outlook in Germany primarily due to a worsening competitive backdrop for mobile.
Although Vodafone has reiterated its guidance for the full year, this now relies heavily on developing countries, with currency risk emerging for FY26.
Investors are likely to be sceptical of the company’s “ambition” to grow in Germany next year, with this seemingly predicated on an improving competitive environment. Nonetheless, the company can point to some early fruits of its turnaround endeavours there, and next year’s trends should be better than the current ones regardless.
YouTube is now the UK's fifth most-used venue for finding news, and a key focus for UK broadcasters and publishers. They made up a quarter of UK trending news videos in 2023, competing with native YouTubers and US broadcasters
We find that YouTube’s algorithms tend to funnel users from news content towards non-news within a few videos. The reverse trend, of non-news to news content, is almost non-existent
We do not find evidence of widespread brand safety concerns impacting advertising on news videos, though publishers still note YouTube is better for exposure and consumption than it is for generating revenue. The ad load is largely in line with other genres
Use of publisher content to train AI models is hotly contested. Unacknowledged scraping, licensing deals, and lawsuits all characterise the publisher-AI company relationship.
However, model training is not the whole story. More and more products rely on up-to-date access to content, and some are direct competitors to publisher offerings.
Publishers can’t depend on copyright to deliver them the value of their IP. They need to track which products are catching on with users for licensing deals to make sense for them, and to ensure their own products keep up with the competition.
Poverty has a negative impact on health in many ways —such as through housing, work, food, tobacco use, healthcare and sanitary costs, relationships, and social life—while social inequality has been shown to have its own, independent impact.
One in five people in the UK live in poverty, including nearly one in three children; almost two million households experience destitution. The life expectancy gap at birth between the most and least deprived areas of England is 9.7 years for men and 7.9 for women; the gaps are larger still in Scotland.
Multibank, an anti-poverty, community-based charitable initiative—which gifts otherwise wasted essentials to those most in need—has the invaluable support of retail and media to realise its impact.
From the depths of 2023, advertising expenditure on legacy media rose moderately in 2024, on the back of an uptick in real private consumer expenditure thanks to lower inflation and reduced costs of credit—the outlook for legacy media is about the same for 2025.
Online stands apart from legacy media due to the growth of ecommerce—driven by both goods (over 26% of retail sales) and services such as travel, as well as intense competition among platforms (Amazon, Shein, Temu)—with double-digit growth in 2024 set to continue in 2025.
Television remains the most effective medium for brand advertisers—despite the decline in viewing—with broadcasters’ digital innovation and SVOD ad tiers providing greater targeting alongside the mass broadcast reach.
The proposal from DCMS to expand the pre-digital “public interest” regime that requires clearance for changes in the equity stakes in print newspapers to online news publishers lacks a firm rationale in 2024.
A plethora of online sources dilute the influence of news brands and their proprietors over British people’s political views, in particular the platforms (X, YouTube, TikTok and Facebook) hosting self-publishing influencers, politicians and political advertising.
The UK's expanded future regime, if enacted, will further chill the appetite of investors for stakes in commercial media, reduce their value and ability to raise capital, and stifle beneficial consolidation.
The CMA has approved the merger of Vodafone and H3G, paving the way for the UK’s largest mobile network operator.
Remedies are in place to ensure pricing stability in the short term, with the increase in sector capacity keeping the pricing side of the equation in check over the longer term, together with network quality upsides for users.
This is the right outcome in our view, with the alternative of a slow, painful retreat by H3G much less desirable for the industry. BT/EE will face the greatest challenges in adapting to the new market structure, with upward pressure on capex spend for all network operators.
Broadcasters have made considerable progress in becoming platform agnostic over the past three years, delivering innovative ad propositions offering greater targeting, flexibility and measurement.
They would welcome the opportunity to work with advertisers to explain the complexity involved in delivering linear and digital campaigns.
Broadcasters believe that although TV advertising is transitioning to digital, legacy share deals and reliance on pricing relative to ITV1’s station average price (SAP) continue to hold the market back. Potential amendments to CRR may allow for a smoother digital transition, benefitting the entire ecosystem.