Most TelCo’s are feeling the hurt these days – job layoffs, margins being cut, new players taking market share – however, one giant has managed to navigate the stormy TelCo seas quite successfully this past year. This week Orange announced the creation of a new subsidiary, Orange Horizons, who’s job will be to actively seek out new business opportunities in markets where Orange is not already a mass-market telecommunications provider.
Orange has strong ties to France, the UK, Spain, and North Africa, so that leaves quite a large market to explore new options. In South Africa, for example, it is launching an eCommerce site to sell telecom-related devices – it has launched a similar initiative in Italy as well.
Orange has been making lots of waves in recent months, whether it be it’s Apple-esque press meetings, the announcement that its mobile profits been virtually unaffected (as we predicted) by Free Mobile’s entrance into the mobile operator space – it has also played a very curious role in the startup scene. While I may not agree with all of Orange’s decisions, there’s no doubt that it has best resisted the Euro Crisis, and it is using this opportunity and the cash it has saved to reposition itself, and I think it will explode in the coming years, to rival Deutsche Telekom in size and influence:
“The Group’s footprint currently covers around 10% of the world’s population, leaving 6.2 billion people who could potentially become customers through Orange Horizons activities! The Group plans to launch business ventures in several other countries in 2013 in Europe and Africa, and will also look at opportunities in South America in order to leverage existing content-related assets such as starMedia (a South American internet portal) for example.”
– Orange press release.