A look back at the last decade
New players were aggressively entering the market and a fierce competition based on low rates and free devices was common, aiming to capture a continuous influx of new customers. But, as in any mature industry, market penetration recently reached saturation
About 95% of households in Europe and the U.S. have access to the internet – so customer bases and profits began to dry up.
Statista July 2022
This phenomenon inevitably led to a huge concentration process, leaving just a few players in every region. As PWC states: “The number of major wireless competitors in each market is leveling off, with larger markets settling at between three and four, and smaller markets at around two or three.”
If the ultimate victors had entered into a dangerous pricing war to steal customers from one another, they would have cannibalized margins for everyone. Fortunately, instead they create a diversified offering to get more share of wallet from existing customers to increase stickiness and grow revenue.
With no more customers entering the market, the only way you can grow is by keeping customers from moving to your competitors, and selling more to each one of them.
All big incumbents are acquiring cloud providers and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) so they can sell, upsell and cross-sell IT and communications services to SMBs, in combination with connectivity.
By transforming into Digital Service Providers (DSPs), these companies plan to become the provider of choice for Software as a Service (SaaS), Security as a Service (SECaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
This strategy, however, requires automation of the whole supply chain. Developing a marketplace-based, automated delivery approach emphasizing standardization and zero-touch scalability.
It requires (solutions) catalog expansion, multi-country, currency and language-capable marketplaces, XaaS (Everything as a Service) bundle management, and hybrid cloud technology.