Global State of Telecom Industry - 2023

Global State of Telecom Industry - 2023

 

Telecoms Organic Growth Play - 2023

Key Message:

• Market Size: $2.9 Tn 
• Growth (CAGR): (6%), Recovering since COVID 
•  Technology Change: High 
• Life Cycle: Matured Regulation: Heavy 
• Avg P/E < 15 (no growth), Industry is struggling in generating ROI 
• Organic Growth: Both Horizontal and Vertical Play are employed 
• Inorganic Growth: Adapt, Amalgamate, Acquisition

 

Telecoms Inorganic Growth Strategy Spectrum - 2023

Key Message:

• Market Size: $2.9 Tn 
• Growth (CAGR): (6%), Recovering since COVID 
•  Technology Change: High 
• Life Cycle: Matured Regulation: Heavy 
• Avg P/E < 15 (no growth), Industry is struggling in generating ROI 
• Organic Growth: Both Horizontal and Vertical Play are employed 
• Inorganic Growth: Adapt, Amalgamate, Acquisition

Global Challenges and IT Spend Macro View - 2023

WIP - more to come ....

Pathways to Digital Transformation

 

• In Business, value can be created by generating more revenue or reducing the cost envelope. In either case, this can be achieved through by transforming the business operations. 
• Composing and deploying new services with compelling CX is key to driving growth in a digitally enabled business world. Besides enhancing operational efficiency dividend is key to improving the bottom line of the business. 
• The following pathways are available to achieve this goal: 
1. 1st transform CX and then Operations - Move from Silos to Integrated Experience and then to Future Ready. 
2. 1st transform Operations and then CX - Move from Silos to Industrialised Experience and then to Future Ready. M
3. ove from Silos to Future Ready State directly that is do both transformations in parallel, CX and Operations. This is the most challenging pathway as it requires aligning Business and IT resources in parallel for a desired outcome.        
• In practice, either path can be followed deepening upon the maturity of digital transformation and how much information can flow without boundaries 

IT Services Organisations Positioning and Performance

Key Message - IT Services and Product Players

• Market Market Size: $1.4 Tn 
• Growth: (6-8%) 
• Technology Change: High 
• Life Cycle: Matured 
• Regulation: Med-Low 
• Business Environment - High Risk hence all of them have a cash surplus on their books and give insight into their sales and organisation culture (loyalty based instead of talent-based like Apple)  
• Capgemini and Cognizant brand has no equity in them and both have strayed from their original positioning. Capgemini in particular has lost its mojo. 
• TCS is the shining light when it comes to brand equity, growth potential, and margin among all IT services players. 
• From India's IT services sector perspective, TCS and Infosys are premium players. HCL and Tech M are low-cost (price-taker) players. 
• Accenture is the flag bearer of a premium tier 1 IT consulting services organisation.
• IBM is trying to compete with Accenture and other IT players to get its premium position in the market. The balance sheet is leveraged and they are getting aggressive in the market and are taking more risks.




Updated View with IT Services Players 











--
View with IT Product or Software Players




ServiceNow is leading the pack of Cloud-based ITSM providers with an EBITDA Margin of nearly 500%. This is reflected in its PE ratio. 
Cisco is struggling with the decline in MPLS (SD-WAN) and IP Telephony (Teams) and facing heat from HPS and cloud providers. Besides supply chain issues and competitive pressure and loss of market share to Huawei is adding to its woes.
Oracle is finding it hard to compete with Salesforce and SAP in CRM and Cloud-driven business apps respectively. 
Salesforce is undervalued and is leading the CRM and BSS domain. Its currently facing internal headwinds because of a couple of acquisitions like Slack, Tableau, and Mulesoft. Once the integration is complete it will be in the topmost quadrant.
MSFT has completely turned around under Satya Nadella. Its 365 and Cloud portfolio is leading the transformation

Software Performance - 2023

IT Services Landscape for Enabling Digital Transformation - 2023

 IT Services Landscape for enabling Digital Transformation 

• Composability and Agility driven by API and Orchestration 
•  Microservice Architecture enabled by containers for Portability) 
• Cloud Native Apps and Migration to Cloud (Agility and Savings) 
• ML, AI and Robotics enabled automation for S/W and H/W 
• Agile Delivery - Devops, CI/CD (Agility, MVP) 
• Ex - from Data, API and Development Management to Campaign, Distribution Management, from Hosting, Security to After Sales Support, Personalised Customer Advice, Ride Sharing, and Business Led Products

 Digital Transformation - M2M to IoT

 

India China Relations Changing Landscape

The changing landscape of India China relations.

Image Credit - Diplomatist

Weekend Reading

 From 7 Rules of Power: Surprising — but True — Advice on How to Get Things Done and Advance Your Career. His seven rules are: 

• get out of your own way — that is, 
• speak with confidence and do not undersell yourself, 
• break the rules — do the unexpected, 
• show up in powerful fashion — with conscious body language and actual language, 
• create a powerful brand, network relentlessly, 
• use your power — do not be afraid to wield power once you have it, 
• and finally, remember that “success excuses (almost) everything” — the powerful attract and retain support.” 

 

Why Buyers chose your Customer 

When buyers were asked to select their top 5 reasons for choosing the winning vendor over other vendors they considered, the top response was that the winner demonstrated a stronger knowledge of the buyer’s company and its needs (68%). (In fact, lack of knowledge of a company and its needs has separately been cited by buyers as their top deal-killer.) 

Focus on Outcomes 

Growing faster than the market - what questions the C-Suite Should ask 

Where is my growth going to come from? 

How do I grow now and tomorrow? 

How do I set up my growth engine? 

17 Common Virtual Selling Mistakes to Avoid

Weekend Reading

Weekend Reading: 

How to kickstart and scale a consumer business: 

 Here’s what’s in store: Step 1: INSIGHT: Come up with your idea ← This post Step 2: AUDIENCE: Identify your super-specific who Step 3: HOOK: Craft your pitch Step 4: REACH: Find your early adopters by doing things that don’t scale Step 5: RETAIN: Iterate until enough people stick around Step 6: SCALE: Build your growth engine

 
Marc Andersen on Technology and Web3, Crypto 

I think this is a foundational technology change, a new architecture for building an entirely new generation of computing systems. We have become convinced that Web3/blockchain/crypto is foundational. It’s a big hill. It’s as foundational an architecture shift as the ones from mainframes to PCs, from PCs to web, from web to mobile, or from traditional software to AI. It’s a fundamental shift and building this out is a 25- to 30-year process.

 
How Companies can build In-House Consulting 

“Management consulting is expensive. The median billing range for India-bred consulting firms and the Big Four is 0.7-1 million per consultant-month. For international firms like Accenture, this range can be 1.5-2 million. For MBB (McKinsey, BCG, Bain,) the range is 2.5 million plus, and can cross 5 million per consultant-month (Indian arms of MNCs often pay global rates.) This translates to gross margins of more than 50%. Given this increasing need for consulting services and the high costs, many companies attempt to build consulting teams in-house. At its core, management consulting requires three things: One, top talent. Two, access to information sources such as research reports and expert networks (e.g., GLG—Gerson Lehrman Group.) Three, the institutional knowledge on domains and problem-solving methods.”

 
Align Sales and Marketing for Revenue Growth 

Strategy Alignment: Both Marketing and Sales functions must dramatically change their revenue strategies to better align with the new buyer. The Marketing strategy of brand awareness and demand generation, and Sales strategy of opportunity management and closing, is no longer adequate. Marketing strategies and Sales strategies must be integrated into a common, comprehensive revenue strategy that focuses on shortening the entire buyer journey, both online and offline. 

Process Alignment: Both Marketing and Sales groups must dramatically change their revenue processes to better align with the empowered buyer team. The marketing process (aka funnel) and the sales process (aka pipeline) no longer aligns with the customer’s purchasing process. The separate Marketing processes and Sales processes must be integrated into a common comprehensive revenue process that focuses on moving every buyer team member through each stage of their purchasing process resulting in a decision to purchase. 

Execution Alignment & Empowered Collaboration: Both Marketing specialists and Sales specialists must dramatically change how they design and execute revenue campaigns. They must leverage their unique professional skills, experience, and technologies to collaborate on designing and executing an integrated marketing and sales campaigns that accelerate the buyer to the next stage of their purchasing process.

 
What’s Standing in the Way of B2B Companies Providing A Great Customer Experience?

Sellers from Mars and Buyers from Venus - Attractive and Action Oriented Seller and Buyer

Persona Mapping with Elements - Buyer and Seller 

In the world of business-to-business (B2B) sales, the buyer and seller relationship plays a significant role in winning or losing a transaction. Creating and nurturing these relationships across multiple stakeholders is a challenging, lengthy, and time-consuming process.
One of the critical activities and constituents of a sales plan is to build the buyer's stakeholder persona that will assist in the relationship-building process. Mapping of these stakeholder personas reveals the type of levers that can be used to develop and nurture long-term relationships with the intent of winning and expanding the sales pipeline. Without the intelligence of the buyer's persona, the sales execution effort will be challenging and profoundly inefficient and ineffective.

 
Besides, it addresses the risk of losing a sales representative because by capturing and documenting the buyers' persona, you can ensure that gathered intelligence and levers applied in building relationships and influencing negotiations are not lost with a change in guard at the sellers' end. 

The framework for creating and destroying five elements is applied to overcome the challenging task of mapping and building the persona. The inherent attributes of each element are used to map and develop the personality of each stakeholder at the buyer's and seller's end in different scenarios. 

Let us explore how these elemental attributes assist in building persona maps.

Fire means Action and Excitement

 

Fire signifies purity and divinity. It comprises bright and vibrant colours like red and orange. Similarly, natives with prominent fire element are ethical and straight shooters. Diplomacy is their weakest link; however, they are full of energy and zeal.

 
Fire signifies charisma and brilliance, and it removes the darkness by brightening our surroundings. Similarly, these natives attract others and enlighten them with their brilliance and action. They are persuasive and convince others easily with their thoughts and vision. These natives love to have an audience, like how Fire brings people together during the evenings in winter. For instance, in aboriginal culture, a Sacred Fire is lit before a gathering; similarly, the Holy Fire is lit for a Hindu marriage ceremony. In sales, these natives attract buyers with their charisma and energy. They prefer to use an audience to position their offering.

 

Fire rules the heart, small intestine, and pericardium. The key function of these organs is to regulate the internal body temperature, and together these organs are known as triple heater or burner. The heart is the source of expression, joy, and excitement, and it is reflected in these natives' persona. They are expressive, joyful, and enthusiastic. Their eyes are bright with a shining sparkle in them. As Fire shows us the path in darkness, similarly fiery natives bright eyes become the vehicle to see this world and remove the darkness of ignorance.

 
Fire needs fresh Air (agile) as fuel to ignite or spread. It is extinguished when the air supply has ceased. Similarly, prominent fiery natives are constantly looking for new experiences. They are always exploring to meet and mingle with different types of people. Meeting people or trying new things keeps them energetic. Fiery natives need a constant feed of new challenges in life to keep them going, or else they stagnate and become hopeless.

In sales, a fiery seller will reach out to multiple stakeholders within an organisation to position an offering. Since Fire moves quickly and rises upwards only, these sellers' inherent approach is top-down because they prefer to close a deal quickly. They don't have the appetite to build consensus from the bottom up. These natives use their charisma and data insights to impress upon sponsors and executives to position their offerings and let them cascade to their respective stakeholders. In short fiery sellers like the spotlight, visibility, and engagement at the top serves that intent.

In everyday industrial life, Fire is sharp and is used for cutting or moulding glass or metal to give it a new shape or meaning. Similarly, in sales, these natives share new insights to enlighten others and build their arguments by slicing and dicing the data. A Fiery buyer or seller will underpin their business case or position an offering using data and analytics. Selling to a fiery buyer means you need to develop new data-centric insights, else there is likely to be no mindshare or further engagement.

In Nature, Fire is bold, and during high wind, it can be ferocious. It burns everything in its path, and it's not scared or worried about any consequences. Therefore, these natives are bold, adventurous (risk-takers), and impulsive. They are prone to making mistakes because they often don't anticipate the aftereffects before starting any activity.

Fire's inherent energy is to rise in the upward direction and move quickly. Therefore, these natives are swift movers and are always aiming for higher positions or growth in life. Their desire to win in life is high. Consequently, they put their heart and soul into every task assigned to them.

 
Fire represents heat, which implies that these natives are anger prone. They lose their cool quickly and panic under pressure because losing or finger-pointing in life is something they can't comprehend. It's advisable not to pick fights with these natives because they retaliate or rebel strongly without thinking of any potential consequences. In sales, their desire to win and risk appetite is high because not only do they want to proliferate, but it's the feeling of accomplishment and winning which keeps their spirits alight. Having said that, when a deal is lost, these natives lose their cool quickly and can become hopeless.

Fire represents the future, and it controls the firing of neurons in the brain. These neurons trigger new thoughts and the ability to think ahead in fiery individuals. These natives are visionary because they are hungry, courageous, and can think ahead to the future. Fiery sellers are regarded as rainmakers in sales because inherently, they are hunters, bold and action-oriented. They ensure that the organisation's top line is in black. In terms of potential deal duration, they prefer short term deals because they can't sustain their enthusiasm and energy levels for a longer duration. Multi-year deals with a longer sales cycle are best suited for an earthly seller.

Fire and Water cannot be together because Water extinguishes Fire and becomes a barrier between the Fire and its fuel (Air). Similarly, in price negotiations, a prominent watery buyer cherishes price peddling, whereas a fiery buyer struggles with price negotiations' back and forth nature. They lack patience like a watery buyer and often let others talk on dollars or end up with an overpriced deal.

Generally, fiery natives have medium height sized bodies with slim hips. Fire's inherent sharpness is reflected in these natives' facial features, like pointed eyebrows, eyes, nose, chin, ears, and sharp teeth. Since Fire moves rapidly, these natives speak and walk quickly and have an easy laugh. Fire is bright and vibrant; hence, these natives prefer bright and colourful clothes to wear.

 
In Astrology, Fire represents the South direction and is owned by Mars. Mars represents a soldier and the commander of the army. The Martian person is brave, confident, action-centric and follows the order of the King Sun religiously. He is anger prone and hunts on his own like a lone Wolf. Being the King's army commander, he governs and commands his troops by applying the top-down approach.  

More can be read in the book at amazon.com

Telecom Industry Australia - Status Check FY 22

The Telecom sector across the globe has been struggling, with industry performance in the bottom quadrant. 

In Australia, most of them are recovering or heading in the top quadrant driven by the change in demand profile since COVID. 

Most telecom companies Beta < 1 (less volatility).

 

Telecom Opportunity

• Key Trends Telecom industry across the globe is recovering from being in decline or stagnant in the last 5-10 years. This recovery is driven by the change in demand profile because of COVID.
• Since early 2020 demand for digital enabled services like self serve, self care, mobile first, remote work and collaboration has grown by 3-5 times. This has resulted in a spurt in demand for data (x3), high speed internet and mobility. 
•  Industry's focus has shifted from Revenue Generation to Revenue Protection and Generation. The Customer engagement has shifted to non negotiable CX (intuitive and simplicity), Resiliency and Stickiness.
• Fulfilment of this demand is enabled by accelerating digital transformation (simplify offerings and services) across the business. 
• Industry is rapidly adopting technology enablers like Cloud, AI/ML, 5G, IoT, Security, Platform (API) and SD-WAN to fulfil the growing and elastic demand.

Three Key Lessons from NBN's Rollout in Australia

 Three key Lessons from NBNs (Fibre) Rollout in Australia 

NBN - Threats to Fibre Revenue Stream

NBN - Threats to Fibre Revenue Stream from 5G, Idle Network, Space Technology Driven Disruptors like Starlink and Kuiper 

 

Highlighting > 2Mn services are  <=25Mbps and 82% of services are on <=50 Mbps.

Today the avg speed is 52 Mbps

Loss Making to Continue for another 2 Years 

Disclaimer: All discussed thoughts & opinions are my own & not that of my employer/others