London South East prides itself on its community spirit, and in order to keep the chat section problem free, we ask all members to follow these simple rules. In these rules, we refer to ourselves as "we", "us", "our". The user of the website is referred to as "you" and "your".
By posting on our share chat boards you are agreeing to the following:
The IP address of all posts is recorded to aid in enforcing these conditions. As a user you agree to any information you have entered being stored in a database. You agree that we have the right to remove, edit, move or close any topic or board at any time should we see fit. You agree that we have the right to remove any post without notice. You agree that we have the right to suspend your account without notice.
Please note some users may not behave properly and may post content that is misleading, untrue or offensive.
It is not possible for us to fully monitor all content all of the time but where we have actually received notice of any content that is potentially misleading, untrue, offensive, unlawful, infringes third party rights or is potentially in breach of these terms and conditions, then we will review such content, decide whether to remove it from this website and act accordingly.
Premium Members are members that have a premium subscription with London South East. You can subscribe here.
London South East does not endorse such members, and posts should not be construed as advice and represent the opinions of the authors, not those of London South East Ltd, or its affiliates.
Some news and quite impressive news too. Looks like there's life in the old Vod yet! Come on Margherita, let's have some more!
Indeed a great update and a great milestone example of why vod is unique in this space. Through IoT, Mpesa and the impressive business services on a global scale, the true impact of the company will be felt by the industry.
Making the IoT services directly available on the azure market place will catapult the business will strengthen the category leadership. Not to mention msft commitment to invest in it.
Let's see how long it will take before people start typing "but what about debt, what about div" lolđ
Garonne, why do you say 'impressive', I see the possibility that it's dynamic, encouraging etc, but it's just an idea isn't it for the moment. Now they have to deliver on it and that will either be impressive or not?
I see this more of a 'win' for Microsoft. While Microsoft may be offering Vodafone their cloud and AI services at a discount, it's Vodafone that are investing $1.5 billion in Microsoft. And once your infrastructure is all cloud based it's not easy to go back so subscription costs could spiral eventually. It would have been nice if the RNS had called out any projected monetary benefits in the short term for Vodafone. Hoping I'm wrong and the market see this differently.
Stealth, it's possible that this mornings little jump in the SP is just retail getting over-excited about the RNS. Maybe I'm wrong, but until something solid is delivered, this is just hope that a strategic development will improve the bottom line. Time will tell, but I didn't read it and think 'my goodness, I must buy now or I'll miss the bus'.
Stealth
"Vodafone will invest $1.5 billion over the next 10 years in cloud and customer-focused AI services developed in conjunction with Microsoft." - This statement doesn't imply msft is getting the 1.5bn investment. Typically in such arrangements there will be a ledger of credit owed to, in this case, vod, based on the services rendered by msft.
Don't forget msft employs over 220k people, of which 80-90% are white collar workers who most likely qualify for a business mobile in addition to fixed line phones. In the 1.5bn, a portion is the credit towards the services offered for free.
Also, don't forget that vod has its in-house large army of engineers and developers which is also baked into this figure and the estimated R&D expense. Already Vod collaborates with Google and Oracle and would not be surprised if they bunch them all together as part of their efforts to lead this segment in business experience automation intelligently. You can't achieve an overarching business automation by maintaining disparate silos. Vod has already come a long way in harmonising their back-office processes and data quality.
Let's crunch some numbers based on a higher and lower band of expected msft spend on vod:
80% white collars--> 176k employees
upper band of average monthly spend per employee->50-->105m/year
Lower band of average monthly spend per employee->20-->42m/year
Over a 10-year period we have the following:
Upper band-->1.05bn
Lower band -->422m
If the truth lies somewhere in the middle, msft spent is ca700m over a 10 year period. I know its a simplistic calculation and would not be surprised if the contract designed to incorporate a min spend of 20/month/employee and the rest as variable to keep the costs down.
"Microsoft also intends to invest in Vodafone's managed IoT connectivity platform, which will become a separate, standalone business by April 2024."
That sounds fast, but it is good news at it will have its own budgets and balance sheet and show a view of its valuation.
Clearly this is well past the 'idea' stage. Proof of Concept, prototyping etc will have already been done.
I didn't mean to belittle it by saying 'idea', it's clearly part of a strategy that aims to improve Voda's competitive position and bottom line. My point remains however, that until we see results, we don't know if it will deliver enough in the right time frame.
Stupmy
For now ....it will help securing this before the next Quarter Results in February with the CEO having to face the analysts. At least it is a signed agreement and signs the BOD are making decisions and pushing on with forward strategy.
A separate company by April shows they have been working on it behind the scenes for a while and the signing and RNS are merely communicating work that has been done
It appears everything is all set to go and progress from here on and of course they have a big market volume of customers
Seems to really be an announcement of VOD moving to azure and using Microsoftâs generative AI tools. 150m a year is nothing invested into AI space.
If you like it, buy Microsoft stock.
Yep 150m may as well be zero
SP reacted accordingly imo
Nice to see that VOD have committed to the M'soft deal for ten years, this must give some confidence to the market (but not the zero IQ Muppet that is Jax, who by the way does not hold VOD shares)
How is investing ÂŁ1.5bn in AI a small sum, it definitely isnât a small amount!
"Yep 150m may as well be zero" What a ridiculous comment.
Vod pays that each month on its mammoth debt pile
In the AI world it wonât even touch the sides.
Jax, that is why you should sell up asap and move on to pastures new. It's a waste of your time, and ours, to keep posting the same dress day in and day out, as you do.
Avocet. Are you saying that jax wears a dress, with the the same dress every day, or did you mean dross?
Jack said â. In AI world it wouldnât touch the sidesâ
Since you seem to know and I donât, what is the average firms pay to invest on average how many firms are investing in this and who??
Jax, I will save you some time googling it as itâs ÂŁ1.5m
on AI technologies. The average spend was ÂŁ9,500 per small business, ÂŁ380,000 per medium business and ÂŁ1.6 million per large business. annual growth rates of roughly 10% and 16% respectively. In the central scenario, expenditure rises from ÂŁ16.7 billion to ÂŁ30.3 billion at a compound annual growth rate of 12.6%.
Thanks Steve but that Microsoft news yesterday is well and truly in the rear view mirror, and after todayâs inflation news Vod is going to drop like a stone.
"Thanks Steve but that Microsoft news yesterday is well and truly in the rear view mirror, and after todayâs inflation news Vod is going to drop like a stone."
---
Jax
You are increasingly reminding of this chap đ
đ
https://youtu.be/d7pioagkX5k?si=VStocxFGCsDt4fnP
Everybody to their own and whatever rocks your boat .
Those spend rates are just for installing/using AI created by another company that a typical business may do. For it to be exciting needle moving stuff you would want VOD to be creating something others can pay them for. That extends into the billions.
They could spend a billion today with nvidia putting in H100âs to create an au training server farm for IoT to plug into.
Iron Mountain are building out massive server farms in Leicestershire next to A5. Investing billions. VW have stated they will invest 180bn next 5 years, much of it into software. 150m will barely pay for foyer these days. Certainly no original software of value.
Yes, but nvidia.
VW
Mole AI is currently super hyped and it's not clear who the winners and losers will be. Trying to compete with the likes of Microsoft, Amazon and Google is a losing game, since they appear to have unlimited funds. The tech is evolving very fast and processors are currently very expensive, so it's probably sensible to pay for access to the AI hardware and software tools of the deep pocketed tech giants, rather than investing in your own hardware at this early stage.
Many 5G IOT applications are going to need edge computing to reduce latency to an absolute minimum, so it makes sense for Telecom companies to move out of the highly competitive Data Centre space and invest more at the Edge. Things may change in the future, but AI products/applications based around Microsoft Azure seem to be current winner; A lot of resource and money is currently being thrown at AI, Telecom companies don't have the firepower to compete so they're probably right to take a backseat.