What’s up with… Xiaomi, Bouygues Telecom, Qualcomm

• Xiaomi added to US naughty list
• Bouygues Telecom plots major growth
• Qualcomm M&A looks smart, reckons analyst

A growing Chinese smartphone vendor caught in US administration crosshairs and the growth plans of a major French operator lead the way in this end-of-week news roundup.

• Smartphone giant Xiaomi is the latest well-known company to be branded as “Communist Chinese military company” by the US administration (Department of Defense), a move that means US investors have to divest their holdings by November this year.   Xiaomi, which is currently the third largest smartphone vendor in the world according to IDC, issued a statement to say it is “not owned, controlled or affiliated with the Chinese military, and is not a ‘Communist Chinese Military Company’ defined under the NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act]. The Company will take appropriate course of actions to protect the interests of the Company and its shareholders.” The announcement wiped more than 10% off Xiaomi’s share price on the Hong Kong stock exchange, lowering its market valuation by more than US$10 billion.
• On the same kind of subject… China Telecom is also feeling the impact of US administration decisions. After last week’s bizarre double U-turn decision by the NYSE to delist the Chinese operator’s shares (along with those of China Mobile and China Unicom), investment firm BlackRock sold almost all of the Hong Kong-listed shares it held in China Telecom, a stake valued at $200 million, according to Reuters. 
• French operator Bouygues Telecom has unveiled its Ambition 2026 strategy, which outlines its plan to become the number two player in the mobile market, add 3 million FTTH customers, double its market share in the fixed business services sector, become a wholesale operator, and boost its annual revenues from about €4.9 billion to €7 billion by 2026.
• Has Qualcomm just made a great move in spending $1.4 billion on a company with no products or customers? Analyst Richard Windsor thinks so – in fact he thinks the deal to acquire NUVIA could be as important to Qualcomm as Flarion was 15 years ago. Find out why in this Radio Free Mobile analysis article.
• A Swedish court has dismissed an appeal by Huawei against its exclusion from the country’s 5G network roll out. As a result, the country’s 5G spectrum auction scheduled for next week is able to proceed as planned, according to Reuters.  
• The A1 Telekom Austria Group says it has acquired a majority stake in analytics firm Invenium, a company in which it had already invested and with which it had developed its A1 Mobility Insights product, which “has already proven helpful in the Corona crisis management.”
• Here’s a lockdown home-schooling offer that might take a bit of beating. London-based Community Fibre has announced it will provide one-year of full fibre broadband to the most vulnerable households in London to help children get the education they need. The 50Mbit/s free service will be provided for 12 months after installation, no strings attached, and at the end of the free period households can either keep the service or cancel it completely and return the router.
• Advantech says it has joined the O-RAN Alliance, saying it will “contribute with compact and reliable commercial-off-the-shelf server designs that are capable of sustained communication workload processing at the network edge.” See this press release for more details. 
• KDDI is the latest Japanese operator to drastically lower its mobile contract prices, announcing it will in March offer a 20 Gbytes monthly plan for just ¥2,480, undercutting the low-cost offers from NTT DoCoMo and SoftBank, which have both matched newcomer Rakuten Mobile’s ¥2,980 monthly fee, reports the Japan Times. Japan’s operators have been under political as well as competitive pressure to offer better-value deals.

- The staff, TelecomTV