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February 2011
Reverse innovation in telecoms: The increased integration of developed and developing markets
Authors Victor Font - Group Managing Director Daniel Torras - Associate Partner Tammy Whyman - Principal
OVERVIEW
As the leading Management Advisory and Investment Firm specialised in Telecoms, Media, and Technology within the Middle East, Africa, Central & Eastern Europe and Emerging Asia, Delta Partners believes that the telecommunications industry in emerging markets provides significant product and service innovation opportunities to be adopted in more advanced markets and across other emerging markets.
This white paper explores the reasons why emerging markets are becoming more active as producers of innovation in telecommunications, which are the key innovations, and the implications for operators and vendors from developed and developing markets.
After the World Wars, as technology and geo-politics allowed for the opening up of world trade, we entered into a period of globalisation whereas Western inventions reached economies of scale by being distributed on a worldwide basis. Eventually, these products were slightly adapted, or de-featured, to appeal to more segments in emerging markets. This phase of global trade is often referred to as glocalisation. As glocalised products were not originally designed with emerging markets in mind, there were still significant pockets of consumers in those markets who were not served by these products, either due to price or to unattractive product features. Over the past fifteen to twenty years, as emerging markets consumers have gained acquisition power, local firms who understood the needs and limitations of these consumers, and who had access to low cost production, soon began producing hit products for developing economies. These hit products for emerging markets have made many Western firms stand up and take notice, especially as their home markets are stagnating. The process introducing emerging markets innovations into Western markets has been coined by Dartmouth Professors Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble as Reverse Innovation.1 These innovations, when exported to developed nations, have often opened up entirely new product categories that would not have existed if it were not for reverse innovation.
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In the period between 1995 and 2010, the contribution of mobile to the global telecom revenue pie increased from 14% to 63%. Emerging markets have been the catalyst of the majority of this growth. While in 1995 mobile revenues from emerging markets represented a mere 2% of global telecom revenues, this figure had ballooned to 28% by 2010. In subscriber terms, the increasing weight of emerging markets is even more palpable. In 1995, only 15% of the worlds mobile subscribers resided in developing markets. By the end of 2010, 79% of the worlds subscribers were in emerging markets. Undoubtedly, emerging countries have been and will continue to be the engine of growth in the global telecom market and the role that market players from the developing world will play in the years to come will shape the direction of the industry.
Following the collapse of the high-tech bubble in 2001, many of the traditional international consolidators from developed markets have been under shareholder pressure to dispose of underperforming and non-core assets and adjust their regional focus. Some of the early consolidators, such as Hutchison Telecom, KPN or NTT DoCoMo, have abandoned or significantly downscaled their global expansion ambitions. In their place, emerging market players such as Russias Vimpelcom and MTS, South Africas MTN, Indias Bharti, Mexicos Amrica Mvil, and the Middle Easts Etisalat, STC, Qtel and Zain, among others, have become true powerhouses, and have built their footprint through aggressive M&A and licence acquisitions. The appearance of these emerging market telecom superpowers is no coincidence. First, these operators were producing strong cash flows from their growing home markets, such as South Africa and the Middle East. Second, the emerging players viewed entry into other emerging markets as less operationally risky, given their understanding of the cultures and business practices of the regions. These factors coincided at a time when greenfield opportunities were abundant and were snapped up by the emerging players. Finally, market fundamentals have added further pressure to the need to build scale. Much of the subscriber growth in the developing world is coming from bottom-ofthe-pyramid consumers and multiple SIM card-holders that generate ARPUs in the low single dollar digits. In addition, intensifying competition has led to aggressive tariff cuts and hefty marketing and network investments, all of which have led to a reduction in EBITDA margins in most parts of the world. In this context, consolidation promoted by or involving operators from developing countries has been driven by the need to build the necessary scale to compete effectively.
Note: Axis positions are indicative and not absolute Source: Delta Partners
In most instances, emerging market telecom innovation has been in the form of new business models aimed at addressing profitably the needs of consumers with low disposable incomes, as well as product offerings designed to stimulate usage of basic and value added telecommunication services.
While developed markets operators have traditionally focused on investing in the most advanced technologies, and have sought competitive advantage by physically owning the entire front- and back-end infrastructure required to provide services (e.g. passive and active network infrastructure, customer care, IT, sales channels, etc.), emerging market operators have taken different strategies. Some operators, faced with much lower ARPUs and a predominantly prepaid (and thus less loyal) customer base, have resorted to outsourcing non-core activities to achieve scalability, and turn capital expenditures into operational costs to better manage cash flows. Other emerging players have been able to successfully skim the barely penetrated markets by charging high price per minute thus maintaining high margins as the business has grown. By adopting new business models, and despite the fairly generalised drop in EBITDA margins in most regions of the world in the past few years, emerging market mobile operators have been able to record EBITDA margins that are on average higher than the margins of their developed market counterparts.
* APAC region includes some developed markets, e.g. Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand Source: WCIS, Merrill Lynch, Delta Partners
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1. The Asian telecom network vendors are set to become innovation leaders
On the equipment front, it is important to differentiate between the network infrastructure market, pertaining to the manufacturing of access and core network components, and the handset market. Until 2008, the infrastructure market was the larger of the two, as operators were focused on building greenfield networks covering huge swaths of territories, and also overlaying 3G capabilities on their existing 2G networks. In the network infrastructure space, former North American giants Lucent, Nortel Networks and Motorola have been acquired by their European counterparts Alcatel, Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks, respectively. The consolidation among North America and Europe-based network equipment vendors of the past five years was an attempt by the incumbent players to defend their dominance in a stagnating global network infrastructure market, and to compete more effectively with the Chinese newcomers. This consolidation, however, has not impeded Huawei from making a significant dent on the market share of the established vendors. The combined market share of ZTE and Huawei in the infrastructure space grew five-fold in the period between 2006 and 2009, from 5% to 26%. Today, Huawei is the worlds third largest infrastructure vendor, and it is breathing down Nokia Siemens Networks neck for the number two spot. Huawei has also been at the forefront of innovation in the network equipment space. Huawei was the first vendor to commercially deploy a software-defined-radio (SDR) GSM/UMTS network in Europe for TeliaSonera in Finland in June 2009 (ZTE, however, claims that Hong Kongs CSL SDR-based HSPA+ network, launched in March 2009 and built by ZTE, was the first of its kind in the world).
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The handset space, however, has an important peculiarity that favours developed market vendors: there is a strong trend towards convergence of networks, services and applications. The recent rise of tablets, epitomised by the overnight success of Apples iPad, illustrates how the boundaries between mobile phones, PCs, TV sets and music players are getting increasingly blurry. Companies such as Google and Apple are leading innovators in this space and provide products and services that are software-centric but also include hardware components, in addition to content and social networking utilities. The innovation lead of western vendors in the handset space, however, might be shortlived or at least challenged once again by developing market vendors such as Huawei and others. A simple observation at the amount of R&D conducted and the number of patent applications filed by the leading Chinese and Japanese vendors demonstrates that Asian players are bound to exert very considerable influence in the consumer electronics industry in the years to come.
EXHIBIT 9: TOP GLOBAL PATENT APPLICANTS
3. Indias (and to a lesser extent Chinas) IT outsourcing firms are gaining momentum
In an increasingly commoditised telecom market, ICT services present an opportunity for telecom operators to differentiate, sustain growth and generate new revenue streams. For most of the 90s and the 2000s, North American and European specialised IT firms, many of which were offshoots of telecommunication operators, dominated the ICT space. More recently, Indian firms such as Tata, Infosys and Tech Mahindra, and to some extent also Chinas Huawei, have been gaining momentum, aided by the large and inexpensive pool of human resources available to them in their home markets and their ability to provide world-class solutions to their clients, often via managed services platforms and offshore software development capabilities, at a fraction of the cost of previously available alternatives. However, as long as ICT firms in emerging markets are primarily relying on cost advantage to grow, the industry will contribute few reverse innovations to the market. 14
Delta Partners is the leading TMT advisory and investment firm in emerging markets. With more than 160 professionals, the firm operates across 50 markets in the Middle East, Africa, Central & Eastern Europe and Emerging Asia. Delta Partners provides three synergistic services: management advisory, corporate finance and investments from its offices in the UAE, Bahrain, South Africa, Spain and Singapore.
Advisory: Delta Partners advisory professionals partner with C-Level executives in telecom operators, vendors and other TMT players to help them address their most challenging strategic issues in a fast-growing and liberalising market environment in over 50 markets.
Investments: As a fund manager, Delta Partners manages an $80Mn private equity fund, targeting investment opportunities in the TMT space in high growth markets. The focus is the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe and Emerging Asia. Delta Partners private equity fund leverages the firms unique TMT industry expertise to create value for its investors throughout each stage of the investment cycle, from deal sourcing to supporting portfolio companies in driving value extraction.
Corporate Finance: Delta Partners provides corporate finance services and has been involved in several buy-side and sell-side telecom transactions in the region. As true industry specialists, the firm offers a differentiated value proposition to investors and industry players in the region. Delta Partners actively leverages its close link to its private equity arm to access the investor community as well as top-level financial talent.
Delta Partners delivers tangible results to its clients and investors through its exclusive sector focus on telecom, media and technology, and a unique approach to services, combining strategic advice and a hands-on pragmatic approach.
For more information about Delta Partners please visit: www.deltapartnersgroup.com For a list of all Delta Partners white papers please visit: http://www.deltapartnersgroup.com/our_insights/whitepapers
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