A decade of restructuring in the mobile sector: A regular column on the information industries

Internationalisation has long been a key feature of the mobile telecommunications sector, driven to a large extent by the progressive liberalisation of the sector throughout the world. This was initially accompanied by a wave of Merger & Acquisition (M&A) activity whereby many operators were content to (over) bid for any network assets that became available. However, generating profits from some of the acquired assets proved rather more difficult than had been anticipated, and as a result the past decade has seen considerable retrenchment among the larger international groups. This phenomenon is analysed in what follows.

Table 1 summarises the position...