It is impossible to open the business pages without some reminder of the huge importance of patents to the telecoms industry. The government’s proposal to introduce a ten per cent rate of corporation tax for patent-related profits is designed to encourage investment in innovation in the UK, and further highlights the opportunities for those who get patent value right. This could mean that some businesses should now take a greater interest in filing patents, and others will want to review their established arrangements to make the most of the proposals.
Way back in 1996, at the dawn of the digital revolution, Microsoft founder Bill Gates declared in an article that “Content is King.” Gates drew a parallel to television, saying that “The television revolution that began half a century ago spawned a number of industries, including the manufacturing of TV sets, but the long-term winners were those who used the medium to deliver information and entertainment.” This statement has proved prophetic.
The tablet market is set to explode over the next five years with retail revenues on such devices increasing from $34.5bn in 2011 to $121.5bn in 2016. Yet analysis from Informa suggests that the operators’ slice of this pie is in danger from independent retailers, such as Carphone Warehouse, Amazon and Tesco and direct manufacturers like Apple, coupled with the challenge in convincing consumers to take out data plans attached to these devices.
Infrastructure giant Ericsson took a big hit in the fourth quarter of 2011, as handset venture Sony Ericsson weighed on profits and sales in the network division remained sluggish. But the company showed good recovery for the full year, notching up a 12 per cent increase in revenues year on year to SEK226.9bn (€), while profits rose 12 per cent to SEK12.6bn.
Swedish equipment vendor Ericsson has announced Ulf Ewaldsson as its CTO, effective February 1. Ewaldsson is currently head of product area radio within Ericsson’s Business Unit Networks and a member of Ericsson’s research board.
Service revenues or fees from m-commerce transactions are expected to reach $37bn by 2016, bolstered by mobile remote payments for physical goods and services and international mobile money transfers. These two elements together will be worth over $25bn in 2016, accounting for two thirds of the total m-commerce market, according to statistics released this week.
The world’s biggest carrier in terms of subscribers, China Mobile, is testing interoperability specifications for the time division flavour of LTE (TD-LTE) with US operator Clearwire.
European telecom operators risk being sidelined in the global cloud computing market by aggressive North American and Asian operators spending billions on an international presence.
With copper theft on the rise due to the value of the metal used in communications equipment, a component manufacturer has developed an alternative cable which uses less copper.
According to UK regulator Ofcom, we have become a ‘smartphone nation’, ultra-connected night and day via the magic of mobile technology. But the evidence suggests that the UK is falling behind the rest of the world in providing the kind of networks needed to support the explosion in mobile device usage and data consumption.
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