News 

TalkTalk’s Business Direct unit serves around 80,000 corporate customers and could carry a price tag of around £150 million 

According to reports, Sky Business is the latest company to have expressed an interest in acquiring TalkTalk’s B2B arm, TT Business Direct Limited. 

Business Direct currently serves around 80,000 corporate customers, making them an attractive acquisition target for Sky Business, which has been pushing to grow its own enterprise customer base for some time now. 

The sale of TalkTalk’s B2B unit comes as a result of mounting debt pressures, with reports earlier this month hinting that TalkTalk is in an attempt to balance its books.  

The firm’s total debt currently stands at over £1.1 billon, with the deadlines on those debts fast approaching: £350 million matures next November and a further £685 million matures in February 2025. 

The B2B unit is likely to be the first on the chopping block, with the consumer and wholesale units likely to follow.  

TalkTalk executives said recently that the business would focus on disposals, noting that the “individual parts [of the business] are worth more than the whole”. 

Reports suggest TalkTalk has hired merger and acquisition experts Houlihan Lokey to handle the sale. 

Sky Business will join a growing number of interested parties in purchasing the B2B unit, most notably including British firm Daisy Group.  

Daisy Group had tried to purchase the unit for £175 million back in 2018 but talks ended without an agreement. 

More recently, TalkTalk was approached by Virgin Media O2 regarding a potential takeover for around £3 billion, but this was later scrapped due to market and regulatory uncertainties. 

How would the breakup of TalkTalk impact the UK telecoms market? Join the operators in discussion at this year’s live Connected Britain conference 

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News 

The investment is the second SK Telecom investment in the firm this year 

SK Telecom (SKT), South Korea’s largest telco, has announced that it will invest $100 million in US artificial intelligence (AI) firm Anthropic to develop a multilingual large language model (LLM) customised for global telcos.  

“By combining our Korean language-based LLM with Anthropic’s strong AI capabilities, we expect to create synergy and gain leadership in the AI ecosystem together with our global telco partners,” said SKT CEO Ryu Young-sang. 

Anthropic is an AI startup founded in 2021 by former Open AI executives and is now one of the most well-funded AI firms, having already raised $450 from investors. SKT itself invested an initial undisclosed sum in Anthropic back in May.  

This week’s new investment will see greater customisation of AI platform, potentially including interactive consumer applications or industry specific sales and marketing. The LLM will be capable of supporting languages including Korean, German, English, Japanese, Spanish, and Arabic. 

Both the customisation and platform direction will be overseen by Anthropic co-founder and Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan. 

The investment is the latest step in SKT’s drive to become a world leader in AI, with SKT’s Chief Financial Officer Kim Jin Won noting that the firm was “stepping up efforts on all fronts to transform itself into an AI company”. 

Last month, four major global telcos – SKT, e&, Deutsche Telecom, and Singtel – partnered to form a Global Telco AI Alliance, singing a multilateral Memorandum of Understanding to collaborate on the use of AI. The four operators pledged to combine their respective technologies and expertise to create a telco-focussed AI platform that will provide customised AI services and apps to users in each market. This signing eliminates the need for each firm to develop their own AI platforms, which is both costly and time consuming. 

“SKT has incredible ambitions to use AI to transform the telco industry. We’re excited to combine our AI expertise with SKT’s industry knowledge to build a LLM that is customized for telcos,” said Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei.  

“We see industry specific LLMs as having high potential to create safer and more reliable deployments of AI technology.”   

How is the AI changing the telecoms world? Join the operators in discussion at this year’s Total Telecom Congress live in Amsterdam 

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Credible sources have informed ISPreview that the Chairman of London-focused UK ISP and broadband network builder G.Network, Sean Williams, has resigned after nearly five years in the post. The experienced chair is set to be replaced by Ian Gray, who appears to be a specialist in turning struggling businesses around. Just to recap. G.Network previously […]

A new report claims that Sky Broadband’s business division, Sky Business (formerly Sky Connect), has joined Daisy Group and a couple of other interested parties in potentially gobbling up TalkTalk’s business-to-business arm (TT Business Direct Limited) within the next month or two, which is predicted to attract a value of around £150m. In case anybody […]

Some 400 homes across the rural Oxfordshire (England) village of Ardington have been left disconnected from their broadband and phone services for almost two weeks, which occurred after criminals stole more than 500 metres of underground copper cable from Openreach’s local network. The community, which is predominantly covered by Openreach’s ADSL and Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / […]

Seven years have now passed since broadband ISP Virgin Media (VMO2) first informed us that they finally planned to adopt the Internet Protocol v6 (IPv6) addressing standard by mid-2017 (here) and we’re still waiting. Customers of the provider keep asking us for a progress update, but sadly the answer remains unclear. Internet addresses (IP) help […]

A few months ago we reported (here) on how residents in two Cheshire villages had been mistakenly been told by UK ISP TalkTalk that their full fibre (FTTP) broadband service – under the old UltraFibreOptic (UFO) platform – was about to be disconnected. But unfortunately, the provider seems not to have learnt its lesson. Just […]

The recently appointed CEO of full fibre builder Digital Infrastructure (DI) and sibling broadband ISP BeFibre, Paul Daul, has today spoken to ISPreview about how they’re overcoming challenges with growing consumer take-up, limiting overbuild with rivals and the need for more UK government support. The operator, which first launched in 2021 and aims to cover […]

News  

A summary of all the essential financial news in the telecoms world this week 

Huawei announces half year results 

In the first half of 2023, Huawei generated CNY310.9 billion in revenue, a year-on-year increase of 3.1%, and achieved a profit margin of 15%. 

The increase was the first since 2020, when the firm became subject to major sanctions by the US that would see them cut off from numerous global markets. 

The ICT infrastructure unit of the company contributed $23.1 billion, its consumer business $14.3billion, cloud business $3.3 billion, its digital power business $3.34 billion, and its intelligent automotive solution (IAS) business $139 million.  

“In the first half of 2023, our ICT infrastructure business remained solid and our consumer business achieved growth. Our digital power and cloud businesses both experienced strong growth, and our new components for intelligent connected vehicles continue to gain competitiveness,” said Huawei Chairwoman Sabrina Meng. 

 

TIM’s stock up after KKR bid 

TIM’s stock was up 0.5% today after the US investment fund KKR and the Italian government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that would allow the Italian treasury to take up to a 20% stake in TIM’s NetCo following any binding offer from KKR. 

Back in June, KKR made a non-binding offer of around €23 billion for NetCo, which has since led to exclusive negotiations. 

Sources say that the deal would also see the government play a “decisive role” in “defining the strategic choices” of the business. 

 

Telesat stock jumps up 50% 

The shares of Canadian telecommunications satellite operator Telesat have jumped 50% after the firm announced it would swap suppliers for its planned Lightspeed global internet network. 

Canadian space company MDA will now build the satellites, instead of the previously agreed French-Italian manufacturer Thales Alenia Space,  resulting in total savings of around $2 billion, the company confirmed. 

“I’m incredibly proud of the Telesat team for their innovative work to further optimize … resulting in dramatically reduced costs,” said Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg in a statement. 

The company’s Q2 results have also been released this week. Revenue stood at $180 million, a year-on-year decrease of 4% 

Net income rose to $520 million, compared to a net loss of $4 million last year. Telesat attributed this to a $260 million payment from the Federal Communications Commission for clearing spectrum in the US that will now be used for 5G services.  

 

Indonesia’s Telkom revenue on the rise 

On the release of its half-year financial results published this week, Indonesia’s Telkom saw a year-on-year revenue increase of 2.1% to IDR 73.5 trillion ($4.77 billion). 

The firm cites the continued growth of mobile data and IndiHome (a home telephone, internet, and Internet Protocol television services unit) for the growth. 

Data, internet, and IT services revenues grew by 6.1% year-on-year to IDR 41.6 trillion ($2.7 billion). 

The firm ended June with net cash of IDR 25.6 trillion ($1.7 billion), down 26.7%, operating expenses in 2023. 

 

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News

The partnership will see HCLTech become Verizon Business’s “primary Managed Network Services (MNS) collaborator”

This week, Verizon Business has announced a major partnership with Indian ICT firm HCLTech that onlookers suggest could be worth up to $2.1 billion.

The deal will combine Verizon’s networking power and solutions with HCLTech’s MNS capabilities, with HCLTech leading post-sale implementation and ongoing support for Verizon Business customers. This includes helping them incorporate new technologies like 5G, SD-WAN, and SASE into their own operations and consumer offerings.

“HCLTech is a widely recognized industry leader for Managed Network Services, and with their IT service expertise and ongoing support of our enterprise networking deployments, Verizon Business can modernize our service delivery and simultaneously heighten our focus on helping customers incorporate next-generation technology like 5G, SD-WAN and SASE into their operations and their own customer offerings,” said Kyle Malady, CEO of Verizon Business. “IT/OT convergence is the future of data-centric business operations, and with the fast-accelerating pace of digitalization, customers need a well-coordinated delivery framework to realize that future.”

As part of the deal, a number of Verizon’s Business Global Customer Operations will officially join HCLTech to oversee operations.

For Verizon, this deal is seen as a way to revitalise the sluggish results of its fixed line business, offering the company’s business customers a modernised, flexible, and ultimately more attractive delivery framework.

According to Verizon SVP Scott Lawrence, the deal will begin to “unlock value” as early as the end of this year, with grater integration expected from 2024 onwards.

Want to keep up to date with all of the latest developments in the US telecoms sector? Join the industry in discussion at Connected America 2024

Also in the news:
Polish operators line up for 5G spectrum auction
TDS considers ‘strategic alternatives’ for UScellular
O2 Slovakia and Slovak Telekom to share mobile networks