Convergencia Research, Consultoría especializada en Latinoamérica y Caribe
Tuesday, January 07, 2020

IoT business continuous reformulation: now flexible plans, complement with big data and NB-IoT are tested

The formula for the promised “explosion” of IoT does not seem to be in the hands of operators. The business does not take off and Movistar, Claro and Personal go out in search of new approaches to add aggression against the offers of unlicensed networks (Sigfox and LoRa, for example). As summarized by Marcelo Guglielmucci, Marketing and Commercial Planning Manager of Claro Empresas, in dialogue with Convergencia, “there is a continuous reformulation of the business model: whether it is connectivity plus infrastructure, plus a business fee, plus advice, the first variant or the first two, or the other alternatives, or giving everything”.  

Personal has positioned itself in 2017 with its “Bipy” watches, accompanied by specific IoT plans, and the first incursion of connected cars by General Motors. The operator showed with these incursions the highest degree of participation as a mobile service provider in IoT implementations, compared to its competitors in Argentina. From the beginning, its position went beyond mere connectivity. Now, after more than two years of the Bipy for child monitoring - and after adding a watch for pets and other one for older adults -, the reformulation goes towards flexible plans.

Martín Heine justified the creation of these plans in adapting to the dynamics of consumption of IoT products. Although it did not provide details of devices or plans sold so far, it said that there are currently more than 20 standardized plans with these modalities (individual or flexible shared), and the possibility of creating customized subscriptions with great agility was incorporated.

The experiences with “wearables” served as proof of concept, as well as other cases of B2B –for agriculture and industries-, and in 2020 an instance of improvement is foreseen against these initial cases: Personal would then be located in the IoT value chain as an integrator of end-to-end solutions.

Faced with this “turn-key” profile of Personal, Claro prefers to partner with specialized vertical partners. The operator's IoT and Cloud Partnerships program exceeded 40 partners in 2019, mostly from government and agriculture, followed by fleet management and asset management. In these segments, the demand for the geo-positioning of government modernization objects and services grew in particular.

“The partners' program aims to remove barriers and make the IoT market explode. Commercially, the "everyone subordinate to the telco" model made no sense. What we do is "co-selling": a same solution, we both sell (Claro and the partner involved). In the case of fleet management, which is characterized by being a huge market, I do "make it a product" and sell it with my sales force, under the name "Claro Logistics". Today we prefer to have a variety of models. In phases 1 and 2 of the program, the objective is to help generate business”, said Guglielmucci.

In 2020 Claro's plan is to implement Narrow-Band IoT. The delay in this network evolution for IoT was due to the fact that “there is no business case”, and the cost reduction that the deployment of NB-IoT in China can bring is expected.

Growth Factors

Alejandro Salevsky, Big Data manager of Telefónica Argentina, admitted that the IoT market is not growing at the expected speed, but two factors can improve the outlook in the upcoming years. On the one hand, the ability to import equipment; and on the other, the combination with Big Data, which would produce results between 2021 and 2022. “Until now, IoT and Big Data products were sold separately in the corporate segment. In 2020 this will already have an impact. An example will be the connected devices for fleet management, to which analytics will be added. This will be a market enhancer. In Telefónica, for example, the monetization unit of big data exists since three years ago, separate from that of IoT. Two years ago work began on a joint offer”, said the executive.

The Spanish operator is involved in IoT implementations in both end-to-end models and through partners. This last modality is particularly used when acquiring devices for specific verticals.

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