Bigger telcos are not necessarily better for infrastructure: A case study of EU versus US markets

DOI10.5281/zenodo.7113957Zenodo7113957MaRDI QIDQ6686826FDOQ6686826

Dataset published at Zenodo repository.

Publication date: 26 September 2022

Copyright license: MIT license

This is data and slides for an anticipated forthcoming publication. Telecommunications companies (telcos) provide infrastructure essential to the delivery of digital content. Further, investment in next-generation communication technologies is also seen as critical to overall competitiveness of a market. This dataset results from anexamination ofthe case to be made for European telco consolidation, through comparison with both telcos in the more-concentrated US market, and with other corporations involved in the information or ``eye-ball value chain. We find that both profits and growth for EU and US telcos are already comparable before investment in infrastructure, and that in line with standard theory, more value is returned to customers in the form of infrastructure investment in the less-concentrated, EU market. Profits are also in line with other companies in the value chain, with the notable exception of the extremely-concentrated digital ad exchanges segment. The data for the charts was collected from Bloomberg, so we therefore have protected the primary datasheet, available on specific request. No discrepancies with information available from other public sources was identified in respect of the data on revenue. However, companies do not report operating profit (EBIT) and EBITDA systematically in the same manner. We based our calculation on the Bloomberg adjusted EBIT and EBITDA. We thank Benedikt Strbl for comparing the Bloomberg revenue, EBIT and EBITDA figures with other available sources for all companies in the sample. In particular, the data from Bloomberg was compared to data from Alphaquery and 10-K and annual reports. The below is a non-exhaustive list of the data points for which the Bloomberg adjusted data displayed a delta compared to the data that could be collected from the public sources used for verification, where only some years displayed a delta in the data the year is specified in brackets: (i) in respect of EBIT: Publicis (2018, 2019), NYT (2017) and Axel Springer (2017 and 2019); (ii) in respect of EBITDA (additionally to EBIT list): Verizon, Bertelsmann (2018), Interpublic (2019). Finally, to avoid any confusion in respect of the segment data for Alphabet, the data is presented as retrieved from Bloomberg in full on the tab Alphabet, data from the SEC reports used on top of the Bloomberg data to estimate the EBITDA is also reproduced on this tab.

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