After the outbreak of pandemic Coronavirus, COVID-19, industries have been witnessing a sharp downfall. COVID-19 poses a threat to human lives and has infected more than 100,000 people across the globe. Several telecommunication companies such as Verizon Communications Inc., Vodafone Group Plc, Nippon Telegraph & Tel., Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica SA, América Móvil among others are some of the players operating in the telecom industry across the globe. Every industry has been hurt economically from the COVID-19. Companies are strengthening their customer base in their time of need by offering them free and remotely accessibility and many others. Besides, the most affected verticals of the telecom industry include infrastructure and platform vendors, device vendors, advertising services providers, and retail and distribution services, providers.
Geographically, the industry analysis has been done on the various region-wise including North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Rest of the World. Each region has been affected in some manner. The pandemic had a dual impact on the telecom industry of these regions. In the Asia-Pacific, in India, the telecom industry has witnessed modest growth and demand, as the peoples are asked to work from home, which requires a network to stay connected and maintain a smooth workflow. Whereas in Europe, in the UK, the Virgin Mobile network feels pressure, as the networking services there has been slowed down, since 18th March, users reported that they are unable to make any call or send/ receive text messages. To overcome the issue, the company declared to give unlimited minutes to landlines and other numbers as well as a 10GB data boost for a month to the customers.
Despite such huge losses, the priority is to take all measures to combat the lethal disease. Due to this major crisis across the globe, that forced the peoples to stay at home. Due to which the companies have declared work from home to seamlessly continue the work cycle. Thus, this prolonged COVID-19 pandemic could be an opportunity for the telecom industry, as it is projected to boost the data consumption and trigger a large demand for home broadband and virtual private network (VPN) services. For instance, in the Asia-Pacific region, the key private telecom companies, especially in India such as Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea among other private telecom industries, has witnessed a sharp jump in the demand. DE-CIX record-level network traffic triggered by the COVID-19 virus pandemic, that is, it hit the 8 Terabits-per-second marks, which has increased its data throughput by more than 12% in just a couple of months. Thus, there’s scope for the telecom industry. Further, some other players such as Virgin, GiffGaff, Vodafone, Tesco, and EE, are being negatively affected by the pandemic.
OMR global recently published a report titled ‘Impact of COVID-19 on Telecommunication Sector’ addressing the impact of COVID-19. The report includes analyses of different regions and countries. The telecom sector has been largely affected, moreover, a surge in cases in Europe and North America in March 2020 has affected the industries of these regions also. In the report, an expected recovery timeline of the industry will be provided with the best- and worst-case scenario which will aid the companies to take their future steps in the global telecommunications industry.
