We have recently completed our December survey of UK mobile users, which shows increased purchase intentions for handsets in general and camera phones in particular.  We summarise the results in this note, which are good news for handset manufacturers, but more mixed for the operators.

In the next few days, NTL expects to emerge from Chapter 11, relieved of $11 billion of debt. While the long negotiations over financial restructuring have been in progress, NTL management has been conducting a huge cost reduction exercise largely out of the public eye.

Weak revenue growth has been a feature of both European and US fixed line incumbent operators over the last six months, with the root of the problem lying in poor growth, or even decline, in the volume of voice calls. This report looks at the reasons.

In this report, we show that price competition between ISPs is helping to push broadband penetration to higher levels than we expected. BT is likely to achieve at least some of its targets for broadband connections. However, this is at the expense of profitability. We suggest that BT Retail is unlikely to make money on broadband connections, particularly in view of the high acquisition costs and the potential for subscriber churn. We also note that the BT strategy in broadband is crippling other ISPs.

In this short note we look at three data product offerings recently launched by the operators: Vodafone Live!, the Orange SPV and Vodafone Mobile Office laptop card service. Vodafone Live! follows a sensible strategy of having the operator define the user interface to help drive revenues, and is launched with two new light and compact handset models. However, the service has many glitches, with only the camera function working as well as it should, and very few of its target market will be likely to be able to afford the handsets. The SPV and laptop cards, being aimed at business users, stand a much better chance of being affordable to their target market, but we wait to see if those products are marketed and executed well.

Vodafone Live represents an attempt to claw back some of the initiative from handset manufacturers, and to offer product and services that add to revenue. We look at the early evidence from the UK about the design of this package, its consumer appeal and the likely impact on ARPU. Vodafone is launching this new campaign with a Java-enabled camera phone from Sharp. It is putting tens of millions of pounds behind Live, apparently targeting the product at young urban males, a demographic group that has become very loyal to Nokia. The first phone is attractive and well featured, but we question whether it is of sufficiently general appeal significantly to influence overall ARPU in European markets, particularly in light of the low levels of interest we are finding in our consumer research on camera phones.

Our most recent survey of handset purchase intentions shows a dramatic increase in interest in buying a new phone among UK adults. 39% of handset owners claim an intention to purchase in the next year, compared to about 30% in the last three bi-monthly surveys.

Last week Nokia launched its first 3G handset, the 6650. Or did it? Although the size, weight and price initially looked impressive, the handset has not really been launched (not until H1 2003), and technically it is not really 3G (the data rates are too slow). By the time the handset is actually widely available to consumers, GSM-only handsets will have a much better feature/price combination, with a 3G handset only appealing to laptop users who would probably prefer a data card anyway. This is good news for the operators - they can comfortably delay potentially expensive 3G roll-outs safe in the knowledge that competitors will not gain any advantage by being first to market with the current generation of handsets.

This note looks at what has happened to NTL in the past year, and the prospects for 2003-2004. It emerges from a period of introspection to face stronger competition than ever. Sky has won the battle for digital TV. Although NTL has been successful in broadband this year, BT has serious plans for this market.

This note reports on our third bi-monthly survey of handset replacement intentions in the UK. Purchase intentions have weakened slightly in the last four months, suggesting a further lengthening in the average replacement cycle. Interest in replacing phones to acquire new handset features remains low. Awareness of camera phones is extremely high, but the most recent survey shows a decline in the level of interest in purchasing, probably as the prices of these devices has become more widely known. Nokia remains the overwhelmingly dominant choice for consumers’ next brand of phone. No other manufacturer has more than a tiny prospective share.

We think that TPS can probably just survive the prospective loss of football to Canal Satellite. Paradoxically, this may not be an ideal result for TF1, because it will not be able to argue that a merger of the two satellite platforms is justified on 'failing firm' grounds. Competition regulators will sometimes allow a merger on the grounds that the weaker company is bound to fail. This does not seem to be likely to be the case in French pay-TV, though TPS's subscriber numbers will be dented by the loss of the best football.

This note provides an update on the state of the UK broadband market at the end of the summer. The number of broadband users in the UK is rising fast, but much of this growth has arisen from the introduction of NTL's 128k product. 128k is not usually considered a data speed consistent with the term 'broadband'. However, ISPs should note the level of interest in this product and its highly competitive price point (£14.99). We continue to say that to be a product of appeal to the majority of Internet users, broadband has to be priced at no more than £20 per month. We also look briefly at options facing non-BT ISPs and suggest that the best strategy may be to launch a broadband product but only make it available to those that ask for it, rather than actively promoting it.

Those that defend E4 and ventures like it point to the importance of programmes like Big Brother, which was hugely successful on the satellite service. We try to demonstrate that even this undoubted success brought little financial benefit to E4. Big Brother, broadcast day and night on E4 over the summer, generated about half of E4’s total viewing for 2002. Nevertheless, it probably brought in no more than £8m advertising revenue, not enough to cover two months costs of running E4. The competition for the 18-34 audience on satellite is beginning to become acute. The best thing for Channel 4 to do would be to close E4, blaming government for allowing the BBC to sink £100m a year into programming a similar, but publicly funded service.

On Wednesday Orange announced a simple new single tariff range for all its new contract users. Although there are some benefits to both consumers and Orange of tariff simplification, the main impact appears to be to increase the price of calls for off-peak users, which is a sensible strategy for Orange and consistent with other tariff increases we have seen recently. Orange may lose customers because of this, but it has helpfully given four weeks warning of the change to the other operators, who may react with changes of their own.

Weak economic growth is usually blamed, but we believe that other forms of communication are substituting for fixed voice calls. Substitution of fixed line calls by calls from mobile phones is increasingly less important. By contrast, our conclusion is that Internet-based communication (email and instant messaging) has recently become a far more important source of competition to fixed line voice calls.