The Month in Telecoms: Jan 2023

If you thought 2022 was a turbulent year for the telecoms industry, then the start of 2023 looks to continue that trend if the month so far is anything to go by.?

Every week we are seeing new announcements and market shifts whether it be mergers and acquisition activity, new recruitment, innovative products, or the world’s most famous businessman wading in on the latest SMS fraud topic. Hopefully the old proverb ‘any publicity is good publicity’ holds true for CPaaS.

I started the year with a few days in Zaragoza with the S and BTS messaging team to kick off a big year for the group.

Happy New Year

The new year brought some more positive news out of Asia as China opened the borders for international business travel for the first time in 3 years. In the past years we have seen a rise in the number of big players in the messaging and CPaaS market from China and it has become a key market for the industry (coupled with growth across the rest of Asia). Looking forward to getting out there as soon as possible.?

Beijing also announced further loosening of restrictions in the gaming industry allowing dozens of international titles to be released in the Chinese market. In the short term this has led to a bump in the stock prices for the likes of 腾讯 and 网易 but in the longer term this is hopefully an indication of further regulatory easing which opens bigger opportunities for the telecoms and wider technology industry. Happy Chinese New Year!!

Twitter Storm

It seems the Elon Musk saga is touching every industry and SMS is not immune to the constant news cycle. It was brought to my attention via the article by Eric Priezkalns on Commsrisk (see link below) that Twitter are seeing $60m per year of fraudulent activity with artificially inflated traffic or traffic generation. I wrote about the wider issue of traffic generation in my October Newsletter, and this further emphasises the scale and importance of the issue. The talk of the messaging industry is that this short-term gain could end up being the demise of the One Time Password over SMS unless a good solution can be found to reduce the fraud risk.

2022 was a difficult year for the stock market in general and the publicly listed CPaaS companies felt the squeeze with the rest of the market. Route Mobile Limited have bucked the trend at the start of 2023 as they saw a jump in share value at the start of the month after signing a multi-year deal with the premier Mobile Operator in Sri Lanka. Route Mobile have moved from being one of the market leaders in India to a global powerhouse with the well-publicised acquisition of Mr Messaging last year and some high profile hiring including industry heavyweights Carl Powell and Ibs Ali .

Another company making waves at the start of the year is iBASIS who announced the acquisition of Austrian aggregator iBASIS Business Messaging . TOFANE GLOBAL , the ownder of iBasis, have completed 7 acquisitions in recent years across voice, data and now messaging. iBasis has been historically known as a voice provider and Dimoco have built a fantastic reputation across the messaging industry so the acquisition seems to be a good fit for further development into wider communications channels.

CM Group have also been busy on the acquisition side for a few years now and have tripled their revenue since 2018 and now are reporting over 40,000 customers. As part of the various acquisitions the company has been through a rebrand to Marigold and are integrating the various products within the business to become a ‘Martech’ leader. It is interesting to see how CPaaS can be positioned in many ways and focusing on marketing and customer acquisition is a great way to create use cases out of existing channels. Listen to a recent interview by AZK Media: Global B2B Technology PR & Marketing Agency with Andy Gladwin (Head of Partnerships) where he outlines the focus on creating customised products to enable clients to use the optimum channel for their customers.

It has been a busy start to the year when it comes to recruitment and role changes. We have seen some high profile moves around the CPaaS merry-go-round and well-deserved promotions.

Movers and Shakers

At the end of 2022 Anurag Aggarwal joined Globe Teleservices Pte. Ltd. as Chief Growth Officer. Anurag is one of the most influential people in the industry (he was voted number one in the ROCCO 100) and is a big hire for GTS as they continue to push on into international markets.

Uku Tomikas has moved into the CEO position at Messente to spearhead their continued growth. He has cemented his position as a market leading voice with his work with the Mobile Ecosystem Forum and this looks like a big statement to push Messente into the spotlight over the coming months.

After the acquisition from iBasis, Dimoco have promoted Ilija Drazovic to Head of Enterprise Sales. Ilija has become a star in the enterprise market and since his move from Telesign to Dimoco has seen back-to-back promotions.

Elsewhere 冯碧霞 has joined IDT Corporation to help continue their push into the messaging business and Luanna Luna Sena joins China Mobile International Limited in London.?

On reflection it looks like the middle market (which is vast in the CPaaS and telecoms world) is stronger than ever judging by the activity and opportunities. We continue to see big tech companies announcing layoffs and cost cutting measures but it seems the mid-sized business are taking full advantage of the opportunity and there is a lot of room to grow.