• Cellnex sells its Austrian operations for €803m
• Rakuten Mobile’s subs base hits 7.7 million
• Indosat teams with Google for sovereign cloud

In today’s industry news roundup: Towers giant Cellnex takes next step in its consolidating and simplifying strategy with sale of Austrian unit; Rakuten Mobile’s latest figures show it is reducing its losses and nearing its full year subs target; Indonesia is the latest Asian market to boast a sovereign cloud initiative with a telco at the helm; and much more!

Cellnex has agreed to sell its Austrian operations to a consortium of companies for €803m, the European towers giant announced on Friday morning. Vauban Infrastructure Partners, EDF Invest (the investment arm of utility giant EDF) and MEAG, the asset manager of German insurance giant Munich Re, will acquire 100% of Cellnex’s business in Austria, including its 4,600 tower sites. “The sale of our business in Austria is one further step within the company’s ‘next chapter’, in line with our strategy, to achieve the goal of consolidating, simplifying our corporate structure and focusing our efforts in the existing growth opportunities in the main markets in which we operate,” stated Cellnex CEO Marco Patuano in this announcement. “It will also allow us to move forward on two other strategic objectives, such as the focus on the balance sheet and shareholder remuneration, thus fulfilling our commitments to the market,” added the CEO. Cellnex, which has struck a number of divestment deals over the past couple of years in order to slim down its portfolio, hinted at an imminent deal in Austria at the start of this month when it reported its financial results for the first half of the year. 

Just a day after announcing it is set to raise up to $2bn from the sale and leaseback of unspecified network assets, Japanese operator Rakuten Mobile has announced ongoing but shrinking operating losses and its latest customer numbers. As part of parent company Rakuten Group’s second-quarter earnings report, Rakuten Mobile noted that its revenues increased by almost 30% year on year to 67.9bn yen ($463m) for the three months to the end of June, while its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) loss was 202bn yen ($136m), less than half the loss reported a year earlier. The operator noted that on 7 August its mobile subscriber base hit 7.7 million, close to its target of 8 to 10 million by the end of this year. But to put the size of its ongoing challenge into perspective, it is still by far the smallest of Japan’s mobile operators and the market leader, NTT Docomo, has more than 90 million mobile customers.   

As demands for sovereign cloud services continue to grow, Indonesia’s Indosat has joined forces with Google Cloud to deliver solutions that meet the country’s “most stringent data residency, security and privacy requirements”. The telco explained in a statement that through the new partnership it will offer Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) for organisations that want to run AI and data-intensive workloads at their location of choice. This will allow Indonesian organisations in the public sector and other critical industries, such as defence, healthcare, financial services, energy and manufacturing to accelerate digital transformation with “best-in-class AI and analytics capabilities, while ensuring they have complete control and protection of their sensitive data,” the telco explained. The Indonesian telco plans to offer hosting options for GDC on-premises, to ensure that data remains under the customer’s control and within Indonesia’s borders, adhering to all legal and sovereignty frameworks. The company’s move comes a week after its Thai peer AIS struck a deal with Oracle for the launch of a locally owned hyperscale cloud solution that, it claims, will help position it as the leading sovereign cloud player in the South-east Asian country – see AIS targets sovereign cloud leadership with Oracle deal.

China Mobile has more than 1 billion mobile connections, of which 514 million are 5G customers, it noted in its financial report for the first half of the year. (Note – the operator recently changed the way it reports its customer numbers so that its 5G statistics now relate to customers that are actually using 5G services and not, as before, simply signed up to a 5G package.) These are numbers that are hard to comprehend for mobile operators in other markets, where such numbers are not achievable even for those telcos with operations across multiple national markets. China Mobile reported revenues of almost 547bn Chinese yuan ($76.3bn) for the first six months of 2024, up by 3% year on year, and EBITDA of 182.3bn yuan ($25.4bn), down by 0.6% year on year. The operator ended June with 272 million fixed broadband customers and almost 30.4 million enterprise customers (up by a significant 25% year on year).   

Veon, the international operator with mobile networks in multiple countries across Asia, Europe and Africa, has reported impressive results for the second quarter, which CEO Kaan Terzioğlu attributed to “robust organic performance across our markets”. Its revenues in the period rose 12.1% year on year to US$1bn, while EBITDA grew 10.6% to $459m. Terzioğlu pointed out that the group’s performance was driven by 10 million additional 4G customers and 111 million digital service users, “showcasing our capability to build new businesses in financial, entertainment, healthcare, education and enterprise services”. He added: “I am also happy to report for the first time the direct digital revenues generated through our digital financial services, entertainment services, healthcare services, advertising services and Super apps.” Those direct digital revenues amounted to $108m in the second quarter, up by 83.3% year on year. Veon also said it is on track to meet its full year targeted revenue growth of between 16% and 18%, and EBITDA growth of between 18% and 20%. Find out more.

- The staff, TelecomTV