France Mergers citing the Race To SCALE, China Mobile also cites need for SCALE
Captains of France Industry see need to act in combination and separately from other owned assets to defend against an apparent contagion. Also State is developing a more secure messaging app to defend against... well, you-know-who.
I have stated privately and publicly that the race to scale will involve consolidations in big telecoms as they are desperate for the option to sell M2M devices with unlimited for life data plans and that requires low cost for hardware. I have further speculated that the leader in USA will look carefully at European units - and I mean VZ and that has borne out with its purchase of Movildata. USA leadership includes staffing of technically up-to-date and 'friendly' network centers.
Today's news portends a big M&A season in Europe including our own telecoms.
IMO
prnewswire.com
Verizon Telematics Continues European Expansion with its Acquisition of Movildata Internacional PR Newswire January 24, 2018 Company Extends its European Footprint into Spain ATLANTA, Jan. 24, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Verizon Communications Inc. today announced the acquisition of Movildata Internacional, a Murcia, Spain-based provider of commercial fleet management solutions...
bloomberg.com
Bouygues Weighs Bid With Co-Investors for Altice Unit April 16, 2018, 10:33 AM EDT Updated on April 16, 2018, 1:23 PM EDT
French firm has held early talks with investors including CVC Shares of Altice rose by most in more than three months
Construction and telecommunications conglomerate Bouygues SA is considering a bid with other investors for Altice NV’s struggling French unit to consolidate the telecom market, according to people with knowledge of the matter.... French regulators are likely to demand remedies ... which could see the top telecom firm Orange and smaller challenger Iliad pick up some of SFR’s assets. A combination could also enable the companies to generate significant cost savings from overlaps in administration, personnel and infrastructure...
bloomberg.com
PATRICK DRAHI'S BIG DECISION Altice Billionaire Might Spy an End to French Misery
Selling French assets to Martin Bouygues would hurt, but would cut a massive debt pile. April 16, 2018, 12:35 PM EDT
Martin Bouygues might be about to do fellow telecoms billionaire Patrick Drahi a bit of a favor.
Drahi's Altice NV is sitting on 53 billion euros ($66 billion) of debt, with the next major tranche, some 9 billion euros, due in 2022. Should France's Bouygues SA -- a construction and phone conglomerate -- make a bid for Altice's French telecoms assets, as Bloomberg News reported it is considering, that would be a rapid way to reduce the burden....
reuters.com
APRIL 16, 2018 / 3:43 PM / UPDATED 2 HOURS AGO REFILE-UPDATE 1-Bouygues denies report it is weighing bid for SFR PARIS, April 16 (Reuters) - French construction and telecoms group Bouygues said on Monday that it was not in discussions with any other operator, denying a news report that it was weighing a bid to acquire the French SFR telecoms unit of rival Altice. A spokesman for Altice said separately that SFR was one of the group’s essential assets, part of its industrial and long term project.
reuters.com
APRIL 16, 2018 / France builds WhatsApp rival due to surveillance riskks PARIS (Reuters) - The French government is building its own encrypted messenger service to ease fears that foreign entities could spy on private conversations between top officials, the digital ministry said on Monday...
digitimes.com
China Mobile spearheads IoT, 5G deployments DIGITIMES Monday 16 April 2018 ... China Mobile is currently deploying its IoT and 5G networks... have 300 million devices connected with its IoT networks, by year-end 2018, according to company chief scientist Chih-Lin I. .. has a total of 650 million subscribers to its 4G services, I said... However, the global IoT device market is too fragmented currently due to a lack of common standards, making it difficult for any single SoC to reach economies of scale in production, I commented, adding that China Mobile intends to unify the specifications of related IoT chips so as to bring a real take-off of the IoT market.
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And in other news ... we got lucky?
SNEAKY ASTEROID SKIMMED PAST EARTH JUST HOURS AFTER DETECTION 4/16/18 Astronomers spotted an asteroid just hours before it approached Earth at just half the distance to the moon last weekend. First spotted Saturday from the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona, 2018 GE3 skimmed our planet at about 2:41 a.m. ET Sunday, April 15. The space rock sped past Earth at some 66,000 miles per hour. The medium-sized asteroid measured between 155 feet and 330 feet across. Potentially larger than the Statue of Liberty in New York, the asteroid was up to five times the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor that struck the skies above Russia in 2013. |
