Faced with slowing growth, operators need to change roles

The past year has been a "golden period" for the growth of 5G users. The market has not yet reached saturation, and the growth space is relatively broad. However, the three major operators have released their operating data for December 2021 one after another. Compared with the previous data, the number of new users and revenue are not optimistic, and there are signs of weak growth. The data shows that China Mobile's net addition of users is only 109,000, China Telecom's net addition of users is 490,000, and China Unicom's mobile billing users have a net decrease of 225,000.

Although the number of users is a rigid indicator to measure the scale of operators' traditional services, in digital transformation, another form of "scale" is also challenging operators - on the "arena" of digital transformation, how do operators Positioning itself, how to expand new value areas, so as to bring about the leap-forward growth of business scale, are the issues that need to be focused on at present.

The traditional "pipeline" communication market has reached a highly saturated state. If the market share of the three major operators is not considered, but the market is regarded as a whole, it may not be prone to major changes.

If operators are regarded as an isolated observation object, many cases of operators are not successful in terms of digital service innovation and transformation product attempts. In the booming cloud computing market, some telecom operators have lost their strategic dominance in the traditional hierarchical structure due to the deployment of cloud architecture; in the digital product market for end users, the services provided by telecom operators are subject to user experience, ease of use Payment and even platform neutrality, etc. Even in the fast-growing enterprise and industry informatization market, operators are also facing the danger of being "pipelined" due to insufficient industry experience.
We believe that if operators expect to play a greater role in digital services, they should pay special attention to the positioning of "Digital Business Enabler", and rationally interpret this positioning through specific measures. That is to say, operators should jump out of the limitations of the industry, use a more open mind, abandon their obsession with being the "leading force of informatization", and regard helping all parties give full play to their informatization capabilities as an important task. The improvement of management level to obtain self-interest.

To give an example that may not be accurate, operators who provided digital services in the past put themselves in the position of CEO more: gain an in-depth understanding of the business, build a technology platform, achieve customer acquisition, complete a closed-loop service, and mobilize various organizations within the organization. Strength to develop products, in addition to taking into account the upgrading of technology and products. In the process, by focusing more on "information flow" and becoming the coordinator of overall resources, the needs of "business flow" and "capital flow" may be underestimated or ignored - which creates a significant risk of service failure.
As "digital service enablers", operators should put themselves in the role of CIO and play a role through the externalities of the information system. That is to say, business planning, product form, and service initiatives are all completed by professionals through an open platform. processing and delivery), business support capabilities (to adapt to the rapid adjustment of business and support promotion), etc., so that various businesses can be realized efficiently and with high quality.

Under this model, the two centers of gravity of "business and information" are given equal attention, but 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 difficult to achieve in the end, but these projects are still being continuously promoted by different entities. After several years of trials and hard work, operators actually have strong resource integration capabilities, and the concept of "enablement" is constantly being strengthened.
However, the following keywords are still worthy of attention by operators during the transition period: openness (co-discovery and creation of new value in open cooperation), dynamic adjustment (insight of the market, development of capabilities needs to move as needed), Agile change (operations need to be agile).

Especially with the maturity of cloud services, cloud-network integration, and information value-added services, operators can find more opportunities for expansion in the industry. Although the "scale" of traditional business areas is no longer so easy to expand, operators can still find a lot of opportunities in the tide of digital services. It just requires operators to jump out of the relatively closed system, make good use of the externalities of information services, explore how to act as a "digital service enabler", and obtain rewards in the common progress with the society. This is the "new scale" that the digital transformation of the economy and society has brought to the communications market.