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Vivendi's only agenda at this time is to effect a disposal of its non-core assets for the best price to reduce debt to manageable levels. This note casts a critical eye on prospects for sale of USA Networks (good), Universal Studios (poor) and VU Games (good), as well as the disposal and valuations for other assets such as Universal Music, Groupe Canal+ and Cegetel/SFR.

With the handsets finally available and (to some extent) working, Hutchison 3G's '3' operation has finally launched in the UK. In this report we review the commercial prospects for '3' in particular and 3G in general.

 

 

 

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.

The recent launch of online gaming from the major games consoles makers has focused attention again on the future of Xbox. Will the online version, Xbox Live, enable Microsoft to improve its position versus Sony? Our view is that Sony’s dominance of this generation of consoles will continue.

Piracy

The troubles of the global music industry are usually assumed to derive from the growth of piracy. This report argues that physical piracy is probably no more of a problem than it has been in the recent past. Digital piracy is indeed becoming more important, but still is by no means the only explanation of declining music sales.

Churn

Little research has been done into why consumers move from one supplier to another. Churn, as this phenomenon is known, is much discussed but little understood. We carried out some research to show what types of people churn, why they do it, and whether it is an outcome of a certain type of personality.

In this report we look at the sales and usage of camera phones in Europe, and estimate future sales based in part on the results of our regular survey of UK mobile users. As a consequence of these findings, we have downgraded our forecast of UK MMS revenues.

 

 

 

In this report we look at three regulatory initiatives to increase competitors access to the 'last mile' of incumbent monopolists: CPS and WLR in the UK, and UNE-P in the US. BT's market shares losses have accelerated in the business market due to CPS; we ask whether this will continue, whether it will happen in the residential market, and whether WLR will have an even worse effect.

This issue of our regular report on TV trends in the UK looks at pay-TV subscriber numbers, the position of Freeview, and the impact of the huge expansion in the number of digital channels. Our analysis tries to clear away the fog produced by problems with BARB data over the past year.

BT will be announcing tomorrow its latest results on meeting the target of 1 million broadband connections by H1 2003. Some difficulty could be anticipated from the slow monthly pace of connections in H2 2002, mainly due to disappointing take-up of the revolutionary ISP-less BT Broadband product (as we had anticipated), despite high levels of marketing investment.