Telco investment priorities: Healthcare and Government in top spots

Enterprise verticals – distribution Jan21

STL Partners survey on telcos’ investment priorities for 2021 reveals that, among Enterprise verticals, Healthcare and Government are the top-rated sectors seeing the biggest acceleration in investment priority.  Healthcare is the most accelerated opportunity.

Healthcare’s top spot seems predictable given that the world is in the midst of a pandemic. However there are challenges to success in this vertical. Indeed, it is some of the things that make Healthcare difficult that make it attractive for telcos compared to other players: it’s national boundaries, regulation, and need for strong relationships with multiple stakeholders – all of which telcos are used to dealing with. STL Partners believes that telco success in this vertical is possible with sufficient commitment.

The inclusion of Government as a vertical on the list of accelerated opportunities shows that other large institutions offer opportunities too, as do Transport and Manufacturing. The strength of appeal of the Government and Transport and manufacturing sectors is interesting as they relate to STL Partners’ Coordination Age vision of the economy’s needs to manage resources better, and to modelling we have undertaken on 5G forecasts by sector.

It’s interesting that Agriculture and Retail Sectors scored less well. Retail presumably because of the economic damage of the pandemic, while Agriculture customers tend to be widely distributed and the opportunities envisages often involve a large number of low cost / low value solutions in challenging environments.

These findings, and others, have formed the basis of our three-part ‘State of the Industry’ webinar series (9 to 11 March). All three installments will be available to watch on demand following the event. There is still time to register for the final installment, ‘5G, Cloud and Edge Ecosystems ’, which is tomorrow (11 March) at 10:00 GMT.