In the face of slowing growth, operators need to change roles

The past year was the "golden period" for 5G subscriber growth, and the market has not yet reached saturation, so there is more room for growth. However, the three major carriers released their December 2021 operating data one after another recently, and the number of new subscribers and revenue were less optimistic than the previous data, showing signs of sluggish growth. According to the data, China Mobile only added 109,000 subscribers, China Telecom added 490,000 subscribers, and China Unicom saw a net decrease of 225,000 mobile billing subscribers. Although the number of subscribers is a rigid indicator of the scale of a carrier's traditional business, in the digital transformation, another form of "scale" is also challenging the carriers - how to position themselves on the "competitive platform" of digital transformation and how to expand new value areas to bring about leapfrog growth in business scale is the issue they need to focus on now. The traditional "pipeline" communications market has reached a highly saturated state. If the market is considered as a whole without taking into account the shares of the three major carriers, it may not be very easy for drastic changes to occur. If we consider the carriers as an isolated object of observation, many cases of carriers are not considered successful in terms of digital service innovation and transformation product attempts. In the cloud computing market, some telecom operators have lost their strategic dominant position in the traditional hierarchy due to the deployment of cloud architecture; in the end-user-oriented digital product market, the services provided by telecom operators are subject to user experience, ease of payment and even platform neutrality; even in the enterprise and industry information market, which is growing at an alarming rate, operators are also faced with the accumulation of industry experience and are "pipelined". Even in the fast-growing enterprise and industry information technology market, operators are in danger of being "pipelined" due to insufficient industry experience. We believe that if operators want to play a greater role in digital services, they should pay special attention to the position of "Digital Business Enabler" and interpret the position reasonably through concrete measures. In other words, the operator should go beyond the limitations of the industry, use a more open mind, abandon the obsession of being the "leading force of informationization", and make it an important task to help all parties to give full play to their informationization capabilities, and gain their own benefits through the improvement of the overall informationization level and service management level of the industry. To cite a perhaps inaccurate example, the previous operators providing digital services put themselves more in the position of CEOs: understanding the business, building technical platforms, realizing customer acquisition, completing service closure, mobilizing various forces in the organization to develop products, and in addition to the upgrading of technology and products. In this process, the need for "business flow" and "capital flow" can be downplayed or ignored as the "information flow" becomes the coordinator of overall resources - which poses a significant risk of service failure. As a "digital business enabler," operators should place themselves in the role of CIO and play a role through the externality of information systems. In other words, the planning of business, the shape of the product, the development of service initiatives are completed by professionals through an open platform, the operator through the play of big data capabilities (reliable and flexible data computing and storage), network capabilities (fast and reliable information processing and delivery), business support capabilities (adapt to the rapid adjustment of business and support promotions), so that all kinds of business can be efficiently and high-quality implementation. In this model, both "business and information" are given equal importance, while risks are controlled to a certain extent. This example may explain, to a certain extent, why the various "smart" projects carried out by operators in the past few years have been very difficult to meet expectations, but these projects are still being carried out by different entities. After a few years of trial and error, operators have in fact developed a strong ability to integrate resources, and the concept of "enablement" has been strengthened. However, the following key words are still worthy of attention during the transformation period: openness (discovering and creating new values together in open cooperation), dynamic adjustment (market insight, capability development in response to needs), and agile change (operation should be agile). Especially with the maturity of cloud services, cloud-network convergence and value-added information services, operators can find more expansion opportunities in this industry. Even though the "scale" of traditional business areas is no longer so easy to expand, operators can still find plenty of opportunities in the tide of digital services. It is only that operators need to break away from the relatively closed system, take advantage of the externalities of information services, explore how to act as "digital business enablers", and reap the rewards in the common progress with society. This is the "new scale" of the communications market given by the digital transformation of the economy and society. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)