Low Cost Bit Factory as Foundation for Axiata's Telco to Techco Evolution

Last year, Thomas Hundt, chief strategy and technology officer at Axiata Group, outlined the company’s efforts to reduce operating costs, as it grapples with the challenge of managing rising capex at Huawei eMBB Forum in Bangkok. Axiata is one of the largest operator groups in Asia, with 163 million customers in 11 countries including Malaysia and Indonesia. MWL reported:

Hundt insisted operators can better handle the “capex tsunami” by collaborating and sharing infrastructure and offloading tower assets.

He highlighted Axiata’s aim to become a platform company which requires building new technical capabilities. “We are very much engaged in transforming our IT” to improve efficiency.

As data demand grows exponentially, ARPU has been relatively flat and even declining, with sub-$2 ARPU in some of its markets, he said.

The price of a 1GB of data has fallen significantly every year since 2020, but at the same time the yield is declining. “At the end of the day, the yield and the costs are not giving us a fantastic data margin, which we have to address through structural transformation.”

While Axiata has not launched commercial 5G services in markets in Asia, he said it is preparing for rollouts, adding in the next year it aims “to unlock the power of 5G”.

As you will notice from the image on the top, Axiata has set itself a target of driving the bit production cost down to 10 cents per Gigabyte. This will only be possible is they utilise the collective brain of all OpCo leaders coming together to make Group-wide decisions, OpCo resources taking on Group targets, and OpCo resources involved in end-to-end execution. 

The group is go through a number of activities to be able to achieve this very challenging target of USD 0.10/GB. These include:

• Value-Based Planning
• 3G Shutdown
• Moving to Open RAN and Open Networks
• Spectrum Optimization
• Improving VoLTE Maturity
• Transitioning to NFV/SDN/Distributed Network Architecture
• Harmonization of procurement across the group
• Squeeze hardware efficiency through software
• Lean/Autonomous Operations
• Network De-risking

You can watch the presentation embedded below:

Axiata is in process of evolving from a traditional CSP towards being both a platform play and a digital CSP (DSP).

Related Posts:

• The 3G4G Blog: The Journey from Communications Service Provider (CSP) to Digital Service Provider (DSP) 

China Telecom's 5G and IoT Progress

China Telecom's 2020 results were published this week. The PDF of that is available here. Capacity Media reported:

China Telecom has reported 2020 revenues up by 4.7% on the year with earnings up 1.4%.

The company said its revenues were 393.6 billion renminbi in 2020 — equivalent to US$60.7 billion. EBITDA was 118.9 billion renminbi, said the company, equivalent to $18.3 billion.

Meanwhile the company said that “5G achieved a promising start, with 86.5 million people now subscribing to 5G packages, 24.6% of the company’s mobile customers. “The number of mobile subscribers reached 351 million with net addition of 15.45 million, and the market share expanded to 22.0%.”

The small print of the company’s revenue breakdown show that 5G customers are spending on average 65.6 renminbi ($10.11) each, compared with 44.1 renminbi ($6.79) for mobile customers as a whole.

RCR Wireless said: 

China Telecom expects to increase investments in 5G infrastructure this year with the aim of almost doubling the number of base stations in the country, the company said in its annual report.

The Chinese carrier said it has earmarked a total of CNY39.7 billion ($6.1 billion) for 5G capex, slightly up from CNY39.2 billion in 2020.

Last year, China Telecom, together with rival operator China Unicom deployed 300,000 5G sites across China and ended 2020 with a combined 380,000.

For 2021, China Telecom said it expects to reach a total of 700,000, offering full 5G coverage in all counties and in certain developed towns, rural areas, railway lines and highways.

At the end of 2020, the telco had a total mobile base of 351 million mobile subscribers, up 4.6% year-on-year. The operator added an average of 6.83 million 5G subscribers a month to end 2020 with a total of 86.5 million. China Telecom had commercially launched 5G services in late October 2019 and closed that year with 4.6 million subscribers.

In 2020, 5G subscribers generated ARPU of CNY65.60 compared with CNY44.10 for its overall user base, which experienced a decline of 3.7% year-on-year.

But the most interesting bit was on IoT as can be seen from this Tweet

China Telecom’s IoT division has (roughly) twice as many connections as Vodafone, and generates (less than) half the revenue.

— Tom Rebbeck (@tomrebbeck) March 9, 2021

Ibraheem Kasujee, IoT Analyst at Analysys Mason noted that, IoT connections reached 237.6m (+50.9% on 2019), but IoT revenue was 'only' CNY2.2 billion (USD338 million), +16.9% on 2019. Implies a monthly ARPC of < USD0.15. Tom Rebbeck, Partner at Analysys Mason noted that China Telecom’s IoT division has (roughly) twice as many connections as Vodafone, and generates (less than) half the revenue.

The annual report points out that, "IoT includes mobile data traffic, SMS, value-added services & applications related to IoT, other IoT Projects, etc."

We will have to wait and see how many of these are 2G/3G IoT vs 4G NB-IoT/LTE-M.

Related Posts:

• Operator Watch Blog: Top 20 Telcos Worldwide in Q3 2020, Based on Capex by MTN Consulting
• Operator Watch Blog: China Allocates Shared Spectrum for Indoor Use, CBN gets Third Spectrum for 5G Network
• Operator Watch Blog: China's Synchronized 5G Launch
• Operator Watch Blog: How many 5G Cell Towers & Base Stations Worldwide?
• The 3G4G Blog: China Telecom: An examination of the current industrial trends and an outlook of 6G
• The 3G4G Blog: Real-life 5G Use Cases for Verticals from China 

Global Top 20 Telcos by Revenue

Source: Global 100 Total Telecom via Elena Neira

AT&T, Verizon, China Mobile and NTT have maintained their top four positions in 2017 while Softbank has slipped one place to let Deutsche Telekom become the fifth largest operator by revenue. Other top 20 players by revenue include Telefónica, Vodafone, China Telecom, América Móvil, Orange, Comcast, China Unicom, KDDI, British Telecom (BT), Charter, Altice, Telecom Italia, Telsta and KT

Related posts:

• APAC's 32 largest operators ranked by revenue

APAC's 32 largest operators ranked by revenue

Source: Austin County News Online

You have probably seen the map above. It shows there are more people in this circle than outside. Its also where many huge telecom operators are located. Well, Asia-Pacific or APAC is much bigger than what you see above. See this pic below.

Source: Wirawan Winarto on Quora

Total Telecom just published a list of 32 top operators in this region by revenue. Here is the list.

Mobile In Tokyo makes a good point (tweet below) that even though Japan is roughly 1/10th of China by population, the 3 Japanese operators generate 37% of revenue in Asia.

According to this report, three Japan telcos generate 37% of revenues in Asia, just ahead of China - considering 1/10 compared population = 10x ARPU. See 'on the Road to 5G' via @totaltelecom https://t.co/S0CMSfDlPb

— Mobile in Tokyo (@Wireless_Watch) June 26, 2018

In other interesting analysis in the article:

India contributes the most operators to the Asia 32 table with five representatives, but its revenue share is just over 5%, down slightly on the previous report. As detailed in the full Global 100 report, India's telcos are experiencing more than their fair share of difficulties, with Reliance Communications and Tata Communications both pulling out of retail telecoms on the back of fierce competition from newcomer Reliance Jio Infocomm. Jio will also be a newcomer to the Global 100 in the next report. It generated revenues of 239.16 billion rupees in the year to the end of March 2018, which equates to around €3 billion and would afford it 22nd place in the current Asia-Pacific ranking and 65th in the full Global 100.

There was a newcomer to the current Asia 32 table in the form of Malaysia-based Axiata, which ranks 17th in the Asia-Pacific and 51st in the overall Global 100. There were previously just 31 representatives of the Asia-Pacific region in the Global 100.

The region's overall revenue total came in around €1 billion higher than in the previous ranking, with the Asia 32 together generating €502.3 billion. The Asia-Pacific accounted for 36% of total Global 100 revenues, down from 38% two years earlier.

You can read the complete article here.

Total Telecom's Global 100 report is available here.

In related news, according to Telecom TV:

Asia Pacific is on track to become the world’s largest 5G region by 2025, led by pioneering 5G markets such as Australia, China, Japan and South Korea, according to the latest edition of the GSMA’s Mobile Economy report. Launches of commercial 5G networks in these markets beginning next year will see the Asia region reach 675 million 5G connections by 2025, more than half of the global 5G total expected by that point. Asia’s move to state-of-the-art mobile broadband networks reflects the mobile ecosystem’s growing value to the region’s economy. According to the report, Asia’s mobile industry added $1.5 trillion in economic value last year, equivalent to 5.4 per cent of regional GDP.

The latest GSMA Mobile Economy report is available here.