climate and comms

According to McKinsey shareholder returns on telecom assets are down 60% over the last 4 years in the Middle East Africa (MEA) region. ( http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/telecommunications/our-insights : Telecommunications industry at Cliffs edge).     The main culprit is stagnating growth.   MEA includes mature markets like those in the Middle East where (mobile) penetration levels are close to 150% as well as high growth markets like Ethiopia where penetration is below 50%.    It is thus not useful to undertake analyses on an aggregate basis.   The mature markets are where data revenues are starting to show signs of rapid growth –but the markets are saturated.    In many African markets – particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa [1] – the decline in ARPU (average revenue per user) is no longer offset by subscriber growth and there is soon to be a decline in revenues and profitability. In order to profit from the explosion...

The mobile operators have been the ‘unicorns’ of Africa for the last 20 years.    Consistently outperforming, not only their global peers, but also all other sectors in Africa – even resources.    Historically African MNO’s have enjoyed higher EBITDA margins than their developed market peers – but it seems the African mobile fairy tale is coming to an end as we approach the bewitching hour of midnight.   The nasty sisters of MTN’s Nigerian Cinderella have reared their ugly heads with the imposition of a punitive $5.2bn fine.     Like Apple, whose once unstoppable iPhone sales have started to slow, most African MNO’s   need to come up with something new and smart or risk marginalisation as demand slows.     The killer App in Africa to date has been voice – but this market is saturated now with   customers from the very bottom of the pyramid – and so voice ARPU’s have declined.    According...

Mary Meeker informs us that there are now 1.1bn  Smartphones  (17% of all mobile phones) and these are driving Internet growth with a total of 2.4bn people now connected to the Internet. Mary Meeker Internet trends The universe for hackers just grows and grows.    One of the most lethal of these attacks is Zeus (ZITMO) – which is aimed squarely at Smartphones. The Zeus attack is an example of several attacks now being launched that are based wholly on anticipated behavior, especially as it relates to social media, single-sign-on and BYOD. A sophisticated Zeus campaign stole an estimated €36 million, or $47 million, from over 30,000 customers across more than 30 banks in Europe this summer. The Eurograbber campaign, as it has been named, used custom versions of Zeus and Zeus in the mobile (ZITMO) Trojans to bypass the two-factor authentication measures to compromise customer bank accounts, Darrell Burkey, director of IPS products at Check Point Software Te...

Not a good week for NatWest innovative banking services.  NatWest Get Cash fraud   ( Get Cash Pulled ) A combination of a simple phishing attack and a fundamentally insecure service led to many users of the Get Cash service ( a sub set of the NatWest mobile banking app – powered by Monitise) being defrauded of cash from their accounts.    The system allows users to get cash from an ATM by keying in a ‘secure cash code’ into the terminal.    The assumption is that once you have logged in to your app you are legit and so you ping the system for the code.   A user name and password level of security – that’s it!.   No better than 99% of all apps on the Net today.    Needless to say the service was shut down once the fraud started becoming rampant.    Does the drive for customer convenience completely outweigh basic security rules. ?   The problem with this kind of solution and others that rely on the presentation ...

Trust /trəst/   :   Firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something. The foundations of the working of human society are built on trust.  This has been so since the beginning of recorded history.   As our communities evolved from hunter gatherer groups into agricultural chiefdoms, and ultimately modern states their operation, increasing complexity and success relied not only upon our cultural evolution as posited by Robert Wright in Non-Zero ( Non Zero )  but also upon trust.   Trust is integral to our ‘culture.’  The birth of capitalism and the rapid economic and technological growth of the last five centuries began with the pooling of capital used by investors to underwrite a ships trading expedition called the ‘ contratto di commenda ’ .  Such ventures could not have happened without the inherent trust that the investors had - that the expedition’s captain would return the profits to the investors....

The mobile ecosystem is alive and well and flourishing and reflects its current status as the globally dominant (and growing) industry  that is becoming increasingly integrated into every aspect of our lives.    The Barcelona extravaganza which is notable for two things.  Firstly its sheer size – upwards of 60 000 delegates dwarfing anything ever held in Cannes ( when I last visited the show) and secondly,  the absence of the largest company in the sector – Apple.   Never known to follow the crowd – Apple rightly or wrongly uses its own platform ( in San Francisco)  to make its announcements and thereby retains its mystique or displays its sheer arrogance – depending on your perspective. That Mobile will continue to permeate every aspect of modern life is beyond doubt.   The first phase of GSM where voice was the killer app has now been replaced by data and most particularly Internet access and mobile applications.  So Mobile expands beyo...

There are so many pundits out there who have finally jumped on this bandwagon.   But lets be honest,  five and a half (or is it now closer to six)  billion people,  can’t be wrong – the mobile revolution is finishing its transition from what have been predominantly voice services to broad-band data services.  The devices that we used to just talk on are now full blown computers and we use them for everything – although we do actually still use them to talk on as well too!.  ( See my previous blog:   http://rossmac2310.blogspot.com/2011/10/human-evolution-and-mobile.html ) There are so many exciting threads to this trend : the Internet revolution in Africa and other emerging markets,  the plethora of new services being created every day that add value to our everyday existence and the emergence of real competition in the mobile handset space.   I applaud Microsoft ( and Nokia) for their exciting new partnership and a handset t...

We in the southern part of the UK have started to see our Indian summer start to slowly fade as we get into this first week of October.    It has been a wonderful but disorientating week with temperatures in the high 20’s (80’s F) – and clear blue skies - I could have sworn this was Jo’burg in Summer.   All that was missing was the swimming pools ! Well I know that parts of the mid-West have also had some great weather.  Indeed in the good ol’  US of A October has become known as  National Cyber Security Awareness month.    Who would have thought ten years ago that a whole month would be ‘honoured’ with such a strange moniker.     Well I guess 10 years ago no one would have predicted that we would have become so utterly dependent on the Web – our every waking and in some instances sleeping moments have some Web connection.    E-mail, social-media,  telephony,  shopping, business, entertainment, gaming  – ju...

Surely this has got to be the obvious question in light of the tectonic shifts reshaping the Maghreb? Is the end game (of this social media phenomenon),  not the demise of the last autocratic regime of any substance ?   ( there are others that will go – but are they as important ? No.  ) There are so many factors at play in the next scene of this incredible drama.   Saudi Arabia has made an offer to buy Facebook  for the ‘princely’ sum of $150bn and hence remove any threat it may pose to stirring unrest in the country.  (  http://abna.ir/data.asp?lang=3&id=228583 ) ( BIG JOKE !!!)  Seems like an expensive mistake by King Abdullah if Zuckerburg and Co are foolish enough to be bamboozled by Goldman Sachs into accepting the offer.    If he thinks that FB is the only way that revolutions are coordinated then he is being badly advised. You only have to read Bernard Henri Levy’s excellent analysis of what transpired in Egypt leading...