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This article is part of: Executive Briefing Service, Recharging Consumer Revenues
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Amazon provides telecoms operators with a playbook on how to combine physical and digital assets into a compelling customer proposition. This 40 page report discusses how telcos can learn from and partner with Amazon.
Telcos can learn from Amazon
This executive briefing explores how and why Amazon is expanding its physical footprint in its home market of North America. Although Amazon was born on the Internet, physical assets from lockers and retail stores to fulfilment centres and airplanes are absolutely fundamental to its mission to provide the most convenient means of accessing as many physical and digital products and services as possible.
Flagging the many parallels with telecoms, this report analyses the way in which Amazon is melding its physical and digital propositions to generate as many economies of scale and economies of scope as possible. For each example, the report considers the potential lessons for telcos.
Like Amazon, telcos have an extensive range of physical and digital assets and capabilities. But unlike Amazon, telcos tend to focus these assets on a single purpose, rather than serving multiple purposes and multiple groups of customers.
This report gives a high level overview of how telcos could do much more with their remaining data centres, their core and access networks, their retail stores, vehicle fleets, devices and apps. Indeed, each of these assets could help telcos to secure a major role in the Coordination Age – a new era in which telcos and their partners could move beyond providing connectivity to help the public and private sector better coordinate the use of key resources and assets, such as road space, fresh water, energy and farm land.
Finally, the report also flags the potential for telcos outside of North America to partner with Amazon. Beyond its home market, Amazon still has little in the way of physical assets, whereas telcos in Europe and Asia have large physical footprints that could be better utilised.
Note, this high-level report will be supplemented by future reports that will analyse in-depth how telcos can make better use of each category of asset, as STL Partners did in this report exploring best practice in the rollout of apps: Telcos’ apps: What works?