Margin in Mobile keynote: finding mobile data revenue opportunities in your customer base

Dan Cunliffe
My job is to tell you a little bit about us. But also tell you a little bit about why we’ve taken the time out today, and not just to drink loads of beer with me later. But hopefully to be able to understand why there’s more money in not only mobile data, IoT, but what you guys are trying to do with your own businesses. Probably the main thing to understand here is that between 2014, when I started the business to 2020, there’s been roughly about a four times increase in revenue in the UK, this is not just a UK proposition, right? It’s a global proposition. We do lots and lots of businesses outside of the UK where you don’t have to have a presence in Europe to deliver some of these services. You need to have a relationship, we need to know a customer that has other customers, that has other ways to deliver it. And I find that the most fascinating about what we do, because we’re not restricted by any boundaries in terms of where we can go. We talk about that last year, there was a 28% increase in mobile data usage. But they’re not just using it for handsets, they’re using it for; 4G at home now, they’re using it for 4G on the road, they’re using it for 4G in construction, fixed lines are an absolute nightmare. We lost £5 billion of revenue last year, to outages through fixed line. Mobile data was the single largest segment last year. I love this part, where I talk to a lot of our partners and say that no single business, right, no single business has one endpoint anymore. So hopefully, you understand that there’s a decent opportunity between mobile data. There are problems though right? Percentages around complexity, some people don’t have the knowledge or resources, some guys are looking to hire people to just focus on IoT in their business, just focus on the mobile data. We can’t find the right solutions. Companies like us who’ve been working for the last six, seven years and built mass amounts of infrastructure to allow our partners to make it easier to get around these problems. How do we help you find capability? We go through an intense scoping session, right? We have incredibly talented people who’ve now learnt how to sit down with you and your business, and go, Hey, what’s the market you’re in, you’ve got a healthcare customer? Cool, let’s have a look at healthcare. If you can understand the sector, I guarantee you, my team will help you find a deal. 100%. Next one, right, retail taken a bit of a hit, but retail is going to change, retail is going to come to us, it will start to move away from major cities, it’s going to start to move into areas where I think you know, they’re going to try and be close to festivals and affluence and that sort of thing. But in the retail sector, again, I follow the exact same process. So in this case I’ve highlighted, let’s have a look at some of the stores at festivals, right? We work through again, and there’s so many options there and immediately I’m like, ePOS terminals, vending machines, digital signage, 5G digital signage, big market, huge market. But it can’t just be typical mobile broadband, it’s got to be on an IP that JCDecaux or Clear Channel is going to deliver their content. You need something different, you can’t talk to Vodafone really about that sort of stuff. Tablets, and the ability for hybrid working is enormous, it is happening. We see it every day. How do we want to connect that? What are we offered? Aggregated services, Multi-network or single network, perhaps put it on their own IP infrastructure, do something that makes it sticky, so they don’t ever leave your business? Maybe it’s 5G or Multi-network. I sat down with one of the biggest resellers in our market £1.1 billion turnover, a customer of ours. And when I showed him this, he said like that’s changing the way I’m thinking about how I’m approaching my customers, a lot of times we approach customers by saying 0 to 10 employees, 100 employees, maybe more, right? That’s a traditional way to look at it. What we’re doing here is we’re looking at, well what data segments in mobile, and in IoT do, they actually want to connect to? And that then drives the service in the background. And what we’re going to speak to them about? I had a good conversation with someone yesterday who was saying that their perception, in the beginning, was that IoT was very much loads and loads of connections down here. And then very few connections up here in terms of data sizes. But hopefully the cake explains to you that there are markets in every single one of those.