CJ Hellovision – MVNO Operator in Korea

by

CJ Hellovision, the largest Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) in Korea (launched early 2012), with 330,000 subscribers. MVNO is not the core growth strategy, but rather a bundled offering of Quadruple Play Service. It offers a valuable bundle to its QPS of cable TV, broadband, VoIP, and now wireless.

CJH believes that growth of MVNO depends primarily on operators’ support (KT Corp) for lower wholesale rates than government determined rates. CJH has no eventual plan to convert to an MNO business. In Korea, the government sets the wholesale rates.

Read more

Idea Cellular – The best-in-class Execution

by

Idea’s superior execution can be seen both in its sustained revenue share gains as well as better cost control vs. peers. Idea has gained revenue share in all its top 5 revenue generating circles in the last 3 years. Vodafone has gained in 4; Airtel has lost in all 5 of its biggest circles. The top 5 circles for each operator contribute 50-60% to their topline.

Idea Cellular has shown sustained margin improvement vs. flat to declining trends by RCOM and Bharti. The sustained improvement on better cost control is especially commendable as it straddles its 2 roles – incumbent in 11 circles and new entrant in the remaining.

Read more

Can Marissa Meyer Really Make the Tumblr Acquisition Profitable ?

by

Marissa Meyer headed Yahoo! will purchase Tumblr in an all-cash transaction for $1.1 billion. Tumblr would continue to operate largely independently. While we believe such a valuation is high, we believe the combination of Tumblr’s growing usage and Yahoo!’s ad technology present an opportunity to improve user monetization over time.

Tumblr should contribute meaningfully to user engagement for Yahoo!; the site had over 116M desktop unique visitors in April (+85% Y/Y, comScore). Tumblr should also bolster Yahoo!’s position in mobile, as its 14.5 million mobile unique visitors in the US (+227% Y/Y, comScore) give Yahoo! a large and rapidly growing mobile audience.

Read more

Vodafone 3G Data Growth vs Revenue Mismtach

by

Vodafone has 3.3mn 3G subscribers in India, representing 2.3% of its subscriber base (vs 3.4% for Airtel and 4.2% for Idea). However, note that whilst data traffic has increased by 165.1% YoY in FY13, data revenues have increased by only 19.7% over the same period, which may indicate that growth was driven by discounted data packages or freebies.

Vodafone reported India revenues of Rs 96.4bn, up 11.5% YoY, driven primarily by recovery in voice growth. Core voice revenues grew only 7% YoY despite a sharp QoQ recovery (+4.3% QoQ). Traffic growth came in at 9% YoY as against 11% in Q3. The SMS revenue decline accelerated to 14.5% YoY, while Data revenues grew ~30% YoY. EBITDA margins in 2H13 improved by 70bps to 29%.

Read more

Cloud and Smartphone – Disrupting Technology Industry

by

From 2007-12, we saw an acceleration of a trend we called “disruptive mobility“, a move toward ultra-mobility and apps so powerful that it redefined the technology sector. We believe we are entering an age where mobility devices are becoming increasingly commoditized and the hardware builds that drove sector growth from device manufacturers to component suppliers … Read more

RCom – Sending Mixed Signals

by

RCOM’s strategy to pull back free minutes has impacted growth in traffic volume, but we believe this should improve going ahead. Its wireless revenue was up 2% q-q, driven by a 2% q-q increase in minutes. In comparison, Airtel and IDEA saw 5-8% q-q
minutes growth. Some 65% of the revenue mix is from GSM and mobile data, where growth is healthy, and RCOM believes it has stemmed the decline in its CDMA business. It is in the process of converting its CDMA network to data network to support higher levels of data usage.

RCOM added 2.4bn minutes in the quarter, implying 2% q-q growth. In contrast, Airtel and IDEA added 11-12bn minutes, hence recorded growth of 5-8% q-q. RPM remained flat for all the three players, although RCOM’s absolute number of 44p was ahead of Airtel’s and IDEA’s 41-42p.

Read more

Wireless Network Utilization – Airtel Vs Idea

by

EBITDA margins expanded on the back of better network utilisation, especially for Idea. The management contends that its network utilisation metrics lags that of Airtel and that it is yet to realise further margin upsides due to this.

Airtel outperforms Idea in network optimization: Two important metrics of network utility – minutes per co-location and revenue per co-location – suggest that Airtel is well ahead of Idea in leveraging in current infrastructure as shown below.

Read more