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1 March 2017

MWC Day 1 – The time machine

The taxonomy of MWC is changing. Nokia has through nostalgia created some excitement in the mobile phone industry but elsewhere the signs of maturity are everywhere.

The notable fall out coming from Microsoft, Blackberry, Huawei amoung others who have substantially reduced the sizes of their stands has been replaced with:

First: Automakers who outside of BMW still seem to be a little unsure of what they are doing at this show. They have realised that mobile holds the key to preventing them from becoming Android handsets on wheels but are very uncertain how they intend to address this problem. We think that Tesla has a very good idea of what it is doing in this space and consequently does not feel that it needs to be here.

Second: An endless list of handset brands who are all selling almost exactly the same device where the proposition is very unclear. Two exceptions are Wiko and LeEco who are at least trying to offer points of differentiation on the device even if they are having a very hard time doing so. Condor from Algeria and Accent from Morocco are doing stock Android but are attempting to achieve some differentiation by focusing on their respective regions.

Furthermore, the app industry, largely present in Hall 8,8.1 and the hallways, has moved into a new phase of development. Gone are the heady days of 2015 when it was all a out adding users at any cost. Now the focus is clearly on engagement, analytics and monetization. Developed markets are pretty much saturated from a user perspective meaning that how to delight those users and making sure that they stay engaged is of paramount importance.

Consequently, the suit count in Hall 8.1 has gone up substantially as has the size of the average stand. This implies that many of the smaller, ineffective players have been weeded out leaving the bigger players who have much larger marketing budgets. Consequently MWC has revealed an industry that looks very mature (just like it did in 2005) but this time we can’t see anything on the horizon to upset the status quo.

We continue to prefer the ecosystems over the handset and PC makers in general as they, at least, have a way to differentiate.

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