China Mobile is currently the most advanced operator in terms of shifting from telco to techco, according to a new report from research house Omdia.
Telcos across the world are striving to make the difficult and expensive transition as a matter of existential survival. Omdia created a benchmark and assessed the progress being made by 12 major operators as they try to reinvent themselves following huge investments in 5G and fibre access technologies and in the face of stagnating returns from traditional communications services. The relative positions of major telcos in the transformation league table are covered as they transmute into techcos that provide integrated communications and technology services, primarily to the enterprise sector. Matthew Reed, chief analyst for service provider strategies at Omdia, commented: “A telco that has adopted the techco model successfully is a software-based organisation that offers services in areas such as AI, big data, the cloud and IoT, and can implement digital transformation for specific vertical sectors.”
China Mobile topped the Omdia ranking with a score of 31 points out of a maximum of 40. That is based on criteria including the scale of its high-speed broadband platform; its capabilities in AI, big data, and security; and its portfolio of enterprise digital services and vertical market solutions. Last year, the telco/techco’s revenues from new digital services, which it refers to as digital transformation revenue, increased by more than 22% and accounted for 29.4% of China Mobile’s total service revenues.
