Daniel Larrosa, director of the Uruguayan state telecommunications company Antel, on behalf of the Frente Amplio political party, warned in a report that due to the loss of mobile service customers against competition and the possible elimination of Vera TV, Antel’s streaming platform, the company could lose more than USD 900 million over the next 20 years.
According to the document, there are two indications that the income losses could be multimillion-dollar. “A first aspect is the number of mobile service customers that will be lost to the competition, since this does exploit this market. The loss for this reason is calculated by multiplying the number of customers lost in favor of the competition, by the average monthly profit for the content business, inferred from the current EBITDA”, Larrosa says in the text.
However, it also clarifies that the elimination of Vera TV, the content platform that the company is considering suspending, could be another important trigger for the loss of income. “A second aspect is the direct loss of abandoning what has already been exploited by Antel with Vera TV. The calculation here is carried out assuming a possible monthly profit (ARPU) for the content, and multiplying this number by the content users that Antel has to date (without assuming that the number of users will grow)”, he explains.
In this way, it’s estimated that the annual loss could be between USD 30 million and USD 86 million, while within 20 years, the figure could rise between USD 316 million and USD 913 million. Furthermore, Larrosa underlines: “the growth projections for this market are very high for the next decade” and that “it will be one of the three main causes of internet traffic by 2030“.
“The current management of the company has shown that its intention is to withdraw from this market and leave it completely to the private sector, discarding everything advanced with, for example, Vera TV, for not putting content of interest, after having reached two million of mobile users, and with periodic use”, he finally explains.