Barely a week after Yahoo!
fired its CEO, Carol Bartz, HP replaced controversial president, director of
the Board and CEO Leo Apothekar, with another HP director, Meg Whitman. Coming
after former Apple CEO, Steve Jobs‘
resignation at the beginning of the month, this makes HP the third high-profile
ICT company to make changes to its top management in the same month, which
makes it the biggest news of the week.
The main reason for Leo Apothekar’s
departure, after completing less than a year at HP is thought to be the
mismanagement of the showdown between Oracle and HP, the latter which was
accused of fraud, libel and defamation, which included the settlement agreement
over Oracle’s hiring of ex-HP CEO, Mark Hurd who last year resigned following a
sexual harassment probe.
While some analysts believe that outsourcing and global
delivery capabilities, will play a critical part in HP’s future, others believe
that Whitman lacks experience (having being recruited by the company only eight
months ago) running a global enterprise IT vendor, but she does have experience
as an enterprise IT customer (as CEO of EBay), and understands the value of
consulting services (having started her career at Bain). However, yet others
say that HP should instead bring back Hurd, who was a visionary leader and
built HP over a five-year period, who was responsible for HP’s buying of the
Palm webOS, among other things and under whom the PC unit was able to match up
to competition. HP
recently hived off its PC business, with no clear announcement on a merger or
sale of this former highly profitable unit, as it felt it could not match up to
market competition from giants like Samsung and Motorola.
Another big announcement of the week was Nokia‘s
hiring Henry Tirri as EVP, CTO and member of the Nokia Leadership Team.
Reporting directly to president and CEO, Stephen Elop, Tirri previously headed
the Nokia Research Centre, and joined Nokia in 2004. He replaces Richard Green
who was appointed CTO in May 2010, and will now be responsible for driving
Nokia’s technology agenda and core innovation.
AT&T
which was in the news recently for its appeal to acquire T-Mobile for $39
billion in a bid to build the largest cellphone network in the US, is now
planning to go ahead with its LTE plans in five cities of Atlanta, Chicago,
Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, and later plans to launch in 10 more cities by
the year-end. Verizon Wireless had last month announced its LTE network in 15
new cities, with coverage also expanded in another ten cities, providing LTE
technology to more than 160 million Americans in 117 cities.
NSN has also launched Liquid Net, a new way to deliver
broadband on the go, which allows operators to set up their own networks to
meet capacity and coverage requirements based on demand. This will also help to
create new revenue sources for operators, while improving the quality of
broadband services worldwide.
Google, in association with Sprint also launched its
Google Wallet
platform last week that enables m-payments on the Nexus S 4G customers. Google
had announced this application arrival in May, and has also tied up with Visa,
to receive a global license for Visa payWave, an innovative NFC-based payment
technology. Google also plans to add American Express and Discover to Google
Wallet.
In India, the 2G case has taken yet another ugly twist
with Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, now stating that Home Minister, P
Chidambaram could have averted the 2G crisis, by disallowing permission to then
telecom minister, A Raja to grant 2G telecom licenses in 2008, which PC was apparently
aware were being given out at 2001 prices, and bundled with free spectrum.
While PC denies these allegations and the ruling Congress party, of which he is
a member supports him, the opposition has gone so far as to ask for his ousting
as Cabinet minister.
In other news, DoT has said it will not be serving a
notice to Qualcomm,
and is instead looking into the issue of the company’s BWA license application
time violation. However, QUALCOMM has written to the DoT that the delay in
approving its BWA licenses is jeopardizing its investments.
DoT is also planning an alliance between telecom
companies BSNL, MTNL, C-DoT, ITI AND TCIL to ensure more operational efficiency
among the currently loss-making PSUs. This is more important because the
previous merger that was planned between BSNL and MTNL fell through twice.
Reliance Communications, India’s fifth largest telecom
service provider according to revenues said that it plans to get offers for its
tower business in the next 2-3 weeks. Reliance Infratel comprises 50,000 towers
which it has been trying to sell for the past year for an amount of $5 billion
to help it tide over its debt burden of Rs 32,000 crore.
In the same week, telecom majors Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Essar
and Idea Cellular announced their plans to start a joint tower holding company,
in order to consolidate and share increasing costs of passive infrastructure.
The government also approved Vodafone’s plea to buy a
5.48 percent stake in JV, Vodafone-Essar from two Mauritius-based entities,
Essar Communications and Essar Com, and transfer the shares from the same to
Euro Pacific Securities, an indirect Mauritius based subsidiary of Vodafone
International Holdings BV, since the transfer involves two non-resident firms,
thereby causing no foreign equity inflow.
TRAI’s decision to limit the number of SMSes exchanged
between subscribers to 100 per day from September 27, in an effort to crack
down on errant telemarketers, has also been raising questions from top telecom
bodies like COAI, analysts, as well as the general public, on whether this is
the right solution.
And after Bharti Airtel
and Reliance Communications,
Aircel also announced its plans to restructure its business and split into two
units – an operating and network unit, to be headed by COO Gurdeep Singh and
CFO Sudhir Mathur, respectively.
In China, leading operators China Telecom and China Unicom have expanded their 3G
network. While China Telecom has selected Alcatel Lucent to upgrade its 3G
network and lay the foundations for LTE, China Unicom selected ZTE to provide
70 percent of the telco’s transmission equipment in 15 provinces, as part of an
ongoing project to build a powerful PTN for its 3G and LTE rollout. Hong Kong’s
SmarTone Telecommunications has also decided to drop its partnership agreement
with Vodafone, under which the cellco was called Smartone-Vodafone by the
year-end. Singapore’s M1, which had joined the Vodafone Partner Network for
roaming and international services in 2003, has also decided to end its
marketing agreement with Vodafone by the year-end.
In the Middle-East, Asiacell,
Iraq’s second largest wireless operator has launched BlackBerry services, in
co-ordination with RIM and Emitac Mobile Solutions (EMS). Asiacell’s cellular
subscriber base grew 7.4% year-on-year to 8.5 million at end-June 2011. Last
week, Batelco, Bahrain’s national telecom operator also launched IPTV in new
development areas in the country, including Reef Island. Batelco has partnered
with Selevision for the IPTV service.
In Brazil, Brazilian satellite pay-TV operator Sky
Brasil, and PSU telco Telebras have signed a deal to launch 4G services in the
country by 2012, as part of the country’s National Broadband Plan. Meanwhile,
Telefonica Brazil is targeting a nation-wide rollout of pay-TV to strengthen
its position in this market, by offering bundled telephony and internet access
under one integrated company.
Finally, in Africa, Airtel Zambia is close to rolling out
its 1,000th GSM site within a year of the telco’s operations in the
country. Meanwhile, northeast African incumbent PTO Djibouti Telecom has
entered into a partnership agreement with Ericsson to roll out 3G services, as
well as developing UTMS infrastructure and improving 2G capabilities. South
Africa’s Vodacom is also in talks to buy a stake in Telekom Networks Malawi, as
part of its expansion plans in sub-Saharan Africa. Spelling good news for
telecom in Ghana, the World Bank has announced that telecom investment in the
province grew by $1.1 trillion from 1998-2008, equivalent to 1.1 percent of the
nation’s GDP, and making it among the top 10 countries in terms of telecom
investment in the sub-Saharan region. Africa’s telecom story is truly inspiring, and holds one of the biggest potentials for
rapid telecom growth among the emerging world nations.
By Beryl M
editor@telecomlead.com
