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IHS: Telco growth muted in 2017

December 21, 2017

Despite unabated network usage, global telecom revenue is on track to grow just 1.1 per cent in 2017 over the prior year, according to a report by business information provider IHS Markit.

Global economic growth prospects, meanwhile, are looking up. IHS Markit macroeconomic indicators point to moderate global economic growth of 3.2 per cent for 2017, up from 2.5 per cent in 2016, and world real gross domestic product (GDP) is projected to increase 3.2 per cent in 2018 and 3.1 per cent in 2019.

“Although the telecom sector has been resilient, revenue growth in developed and developing economies has slowed dramatically due to saturation and fierce competition,” said Stéphane Téral, executive director of research and analysis and advisor at IHS Markit. “At this point, every region is showing revenue growth in the low single digits when not declining, and there is no direct positive correlation between slow economic expansion and anemic telecom revenue growth or decline as seen year after year in Europe, for instance.”

China alone is tamping down global telecom capex in 2017

IHS Markit forecasts a 1.8 per cent year-over-year decline in global telecom capital expenditures (capex) in 2017, mainly a result of a 13 per cent year-over-year falloff in Chinese telecom capex. Asia Pacific outspends every other region in the world on telecom equipment.

“Call it precision investment, strategically focused investment or tactical investment, but all three of China’s service providers — China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom — scaled back their 2017 spending plans, and the end result is another double-digit drop in China’s telecom capex bucket, with mobile infrastructure hit the hardest,” Téral said. “Bringing down capital intensity to reasonable levels of 15 to 20 per cent is the chief goal of these operators.”

The virtualisation trend

A transformation is underway in service provider networks, epitomised by software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV), which involve the automation of processes such as customer interaction, as well as the addition of more telemetry and analytics with feedback loops into network operations, operations and business support systems, and service assurance.

“Many service providers have deployed new architectural options — including content delivery networks, distributed broadband network gateways, distributed mini data centers in smart central offices, and video optimisation,” said Michael Howard, executive director of research and analysis for carrier networks at IHS Markit. “Nearly all operators are madly learning how to use SDN and NFV, and the growing deployments today bring us to declare 2017 as The Year of SDN and NFV.”

Data is the new oil, and AI is the engine

Big data is becoming more manageable, and operators are leveraging subscriber and network intelligence to support the automation and optimization of their networks using SDN, NFV and initial forays into using analytics, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

“Forward-thinking operators are experimenting with how to use anonymised subscriber data and analytics to create targeted services and broker this information to third parties such as retailers and internet content providers like Google,” Téral said. “No matter their size, market or current level of digitisation, service providers need to rethink their roles in the new age of information and reset the strategies needed to capitalise on this opportunity.”

Categories: Articles, Markets, Research, Telco