VMO2 reported solid financials in Q1, with revenue and EBITDA growth both improving and both (just) ahead of full year guidance.
Subscriber momentum however was poor across fixed and mobile, despite customer service improving, with broadband in particular likely to get worse as network buildout slows.
Meeting full year guidance is still achievable, but will likely require a significant altnet slowdown sooner rather than later in the year.
In the year following its IPO, Reddit has defied our expectations, reporting five straight quarters of positive adjusted operating income and strong growth.
Profitability stems from disciplined cost management alongside exceptional user growth, with a focus on advertising performance and limited distractions.
The platform's human-generated conversations are proving valuable in the AI era, but AI strength could become a vulnerability if synthetic content overwhelms authentic discussion.
The USA is reshaping the global economic order in defiance of trade treaties; however, the rest of the world is observing trade treaties and absorbing the shock of the tariff wall erected around the US market.
The UK is relatively spared among the 90 origins hit by the USA's tariffs on imports of goods, which do not apply to services' exports to the US, twice the value of goods, including media (e.g. TV programmes) and advertising services.
The timing of the deteriorating global outlook is poor due to the headwinds facing the UK economy that are impairing the recovery of advertising in 2025.
Most regulations within the TAR26 condoc were continuations of the previous pro-investment regulations, albeit with little progress made on copper withdrawal, no extra help for the struggling altnets and a number of unexpected twists at the margin.
Within the detail, the most significant hit is the return of cost-based price controls to some leased line charges, and across all of the proposed changes, Openreach has on balance fared worse than retail ISPs, albeit at a scale that is manageable within the BT Group.
Ofcom showed no inclination to offer any extra help to the struggling altnet industry, regarding its inefficiencies as being its own (and its investors’) problem, with consolidation the only sensible path forward for most.
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Trump II is already proving to be a more serious threat to an independent, robust news media than Trump I.
Trump’s direct power around news media is limited, but the threat comes from an unprecedented politicisation of federal regulators, enforcement and procurement—to favour friends and punish enemies.
Opposition to Trump II is weaker and more divided than the broad ‘resistance’ to Trump I. Big tech companies are going for a close embrace, hoping to steer policy to their advantage—while others bend the knee to avoid punishment.
AI agents capable of complex, self-directed tasks are becoming a reality, with capabilities set to improve dramatically through this year, and diffuse widely.
Consumer agent uptake will be hard to time, but fast when it occurs. Enterprise adoption will happen slower but with greater inevitability, as agents offer strong productivity gains across many business functions.
TMT firms should be able to capitalise on much of these potential cost savings, but are exposed to a number of specific risks around agents acting as new digital middlemen, disintermediating traditional web ecosystems within advertising and ecommerce.
Despite the success and popularity of Amazon’s Echo, the rationale for this device in Amazon’s ecosystem has been unclear—until now.
The introduction of Alexa+ to Echo devices—enhanced with generative AI which improves its voice user-interface—aims to change this.
Alexa+ is designed to increase Prime lock-in, and enables Amazon to differentiate its devices and operating systems.
US big tech companies are deploying hundreds of billions of dollars to remake the global economy in their image, as enviable growth contrasts with layoffs and low morale.
The cost of using AI models will fall in 2025 and make more AI applications possible. Regulation is caught between pressure from Trump and investigations that must go on, such as digital markets.
Microsoft and Google have tied their fortunes to AI. Amazon and Meta stand to realise business gains from AI, while Apple is the outlier: capex declined in 2024 as it focuses on iPhone and services.
BT had a solid-but-mixed Q3, with revenue growth slightly weaker than expected, EBITDA growth slightly stronger, and subscriber net adds a touch weak across broadband, mobile and Openreach
The outlook is buoyed by a likely altnet slowdown at some point in FY26, with this set to help subscriber numbers at Consumer/Openreach and pricing at Consumer
The main cloud is the potential effect of a merged Vodafone-Three challenging BT/EE for best network and boosting MVNOs, a challenge we feel is real but manageable for BT
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.