Employment reached an all time high in 2019 of 32.8 million people at work despite slower GDP growth in 2017-19. The tighter labour market has helped real wage growth. A two-tier jobs market has emerged, with high-grade skilled roles evolving in a wide range of service sectors, and a large pool of low-grade, part-time work  

The heterogeneous labour market has ensured that in recruitment classifieds, unlike property and auto, no digital player has achieved absolute dominance. In the layer devoted to the recruitment of professionals, served by LinkedIn, rising demand for more specialised roles has expanded the number of agencies, intensive users of digital tools to locate recruits and crack the problem of "approachability" of those already in the job  

Online job portals are rushing to improve their AI and programmatic capabilities as specialisation prompts a shift from keyword search to smart matching, leading to a boom in recruitment tech M&A. Traditional agencies such as Hays are upgrading their own data capabilities through acquisitions and partnerships with LinkedIn, Google, Salesforce and other data/tech providers 

 

Comcast’s new, on-demand service, launching in April, is an attempt to break NBCU’s unsustainable dependence on sales to Netflix and other SVODs. Peacock provides a path of digital transition for advertising-funded TV with a revamped low-load, high cost-per-thousand model.

Reach will be built with a free online tier and distribution to Comcast subscribers. Peacock seeks carriage from other pay-TV operators, with which reciprocal deals would make sense (i.e. HBO Max on Comcast alongside Peacock on AT&T’s platforms).

In Europe, where Comcast has no existing major free-TV offering to transition, launching Peacock will be challenging but could present Sky with ideas to counterweigh Netflix on its own service.

France Télécom’s Orange TV premium strategy presents an interesting example of diversification into low cost ‘light’ pay-TV offers by an incumbent telecoms operator. Orange Sport and Orange Cinéma Séries are offered exclusively to Orange's 2.55 million TV subscribers, and five quarters after launch, adoption is 20%. This report draws several lessons on this type of venture for other incumbent operators

Ending a simmering commercial dispute, Vivendi’s Canal+ has agreed to distribute its packages to France Télécom’s Orange TV satellite customers, allowing Orange to relaunch its DTH platform (targeting 4 million customers off the DSL TV footprint) after its dismal ‘do-it-alone’ first six months

Canal+ recruitments will benefit from the resumption of active marketing for its packages over Orange TV platforms, after a poor year for subscriber growth

Canal+ catch-up TV will now be available to all Orange Canal+ DSL TV subscribers, as it is to those on Free, where it is very popular, plus Orange satellite subscribers, thus giving Orange back the leadership position on IPTV in France

Iliad’s 2006 results were solid with broadband subscriber growth on target, DSL market share up one point to 19%, ARPU up 7% to €34.5/month and churn (enviably) at just below 1% per month. Over 1 million of Iliad’s subscribers have dropped France Télécom line rental and Iliad now completely owns those fixed-line telecoms customer relationships

Wanadoo just reported its H1 2003 results and the FY 2003 Group EBITDA target looks well in hand thanks to the outstanding performance of the directories division. The performance of the Internet segment has been less satisfactory for two reasons: Wanadoo France is facing stiff competition from Free on the 512k DSL segment; and Freeserve in the UK and Eresmas in Spain have seen very slow subscriber and revenue growth due to barebones customer acquisition activity. Wanadoo will be ramping up DSL customer acquisition activity from September onwards to achieve Internet segment targets and may reduce prices in the UK.

Wanadoo reached an important milestone in 2002, reporting its first (very small) positive EBITDA margin on its French Internet business, thanks to broadband-related revenue increases and lower narrowband and broadband access costs. In contrast, losses widened at Wanadoo's Internet properties outside France, in particular Freeserve in the UK and Eresmas is Spain, but these were more than fully offset by profits on the Directories segment. This note looks ahead to 2003, when Wanadoo expects to reach positive EBITDA on the Internet segment as a whole, thanks to continued improvement in France and tightly contained losses at Freeserve and Eresmas.