Emerging markets are playing a significant role in the telecommunications industry. Examples of emerging markets include Southeast Asia, Africa, and even China. Consider what countries have the room for the most growth. In India, 18% of people have cell phones.* Also, only 38% of people living in China use cell phones.* Companies providing service to these countries have vast room to grow. One must be careful when considering where opportunities lay for the telecommunications market in developing countries. For instance, there may be plenty of room for growth in India, but a fellow B.R.I.C. country, Russia, already has a saturated market. Just because a country is a developing country does not mean that the country has large opportunities for telecommunications growth.
Three companies that are taking advantage of these markets are MTN Group, China Mobile, and Millicom International Cellular. MTN Group is seizing opportunities for growth in the Middle East and Africa. It has 14.9 million customers in Nigeria and 14.1 million customers in South Africa.* China mobile has lots of room to grow in its home country where, as stated before, only 38% of people living there use cell phones*. Millicom International Cellular is another emerging company with “third quarter results show[ing] year-over-year subscriber growth of 77%”.* Millicom’s largest customer base is in Central America.
Aside from market expansion, the telecommunications landscape has not changed as a result of entrepreneurs. Developments in the industry have mainly come from large, existing companies. The cell phone was developed at Motorola by Dr. Martin Cooper. The World Wide Web was the making of Tim Berners-Lee when he was working at the European Particle Physics Laboratory. The monopolization of the telecommunications market for many years in the United States and other countries probably resulted in the lack of entrepreneurial achievements in the field. One notable exception is Tom Carter, who invented the Hush-a-Phone, which enable people to speak in a whisper while on a telephone, and the Caterfone, which allowed radio calls to enter the telephone system.
*Numbers from 2007.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/57038-four-emerging-telecom-stock-picks
http://www.cellular.co.za/cellphone_inventor.htm
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/
http://som.csudh.edu/cis/lpress/471/hout/telecomhistory/
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