China Mobile's customer growth rate slows to 3.2% as ARPU declines

China Mobile was serving 935 million mobile lines as of 30-June-2019, up 3.2% from 906 million a year earlier. Of these, 734 million lines were served on the 4G network, up 8.4% compared to mid-2018.

China Mobile reported a 10.1% decline in Mobile ARPU to RMB 52.2 (US$7.40) from RMB 58.1 (US$8.24) a year earlier.

In the first half of 2019, China Mobile recorded operating revenue of RMB 389.4 billion (US$55.24 billion), which represented a decrease of 0.6% compared with the same period last year. Of this, revenue from telecommunications services accounted for RMB351.4 billion, down by 1.3% year-on- year.

Nevertheless, China Mobile's EBITDA improved to RMB151.1 billion, up by 3.6% compared with the first half of 2018. This represents an EBITDA margin of 38.8%, or an increase of 1.6 percentage points year-on-year.

Capital expenditure for the first half of 2019 was RMB 85.2 billion (US$12.08 billion).

Mr. Yang Jie, Chairman of China Mobile, commented, "In the first half of 2019, we witnessed ever-intensifying competition within the telecommunications industry and from cross-sector players. When this is combined with the continued implementation of the national policy on "speed upgrade and tariff reduction", the operating environment has become more complex and is full of uncertainty. Faced with these challenges, we have introduced timely and measured adjustments to our operations. While adhering to the "Big Connectivity" strategy and advancing the integrated development of the "four growth engines" (personal mobile, household, corporate and emerging businesses), we have maintained a clear focus on high-quality development, supported by solid progress in our business transformation and upgrade. In addition, we have stepped up reforms and innovation, laid out plans for 5G development and introduced measures to further reduce costs and increase operating efficiency."

Additional notes:

In June 2019, China Mobile was granted a 5G commercial licence. The company says economic and social development in China is creating an immediate demand for 5G, "presenting opportunities for the transformation and development of the information and communications industry like never before. "

https://www.chinamobileltd.com/en/file/view.php?id=216467

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AWS automates data lake formation

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

, an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of

AWS Lake Formation, a fully managed service that makes it much easier for customers to build, secure, and manage data lakes, entered general availability status.

The service simplifies and automates steps usually required to create a data lake, including collecting, cleaning, and cataloging data, and securely making that data available for analytics.

AWS is supporting a variety of data sources using pre-defined templates to automatically classify and prepare the data,. Customers can then analyze this data using their choice of AWS analytics and machine learning services, including Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, and AWS Glue, with Amazon EMR, Amazon QuickSight, and Amazon SageMaker following in the next few months. There are no additional charges required to use AWS Lake Formation, and customers pay only for the underlying AWS services used.

“Our customers tell us that Amazon S3 is the ideal place to house their data lakes, which is why AWS hosts more data lakes than anyone else – with tens of thousands and growing every day. They’ve also told us that they want it to be easier and faster to set up and manage their data lakes,” said Raju Gulabani, Vice President, Databases, Analytics, and Machine Learning, AWS. “That’s why we built AWS Lake Formation, so customers can spend more time learning from their data and innovating, rather than wrestling that data into functioning data lakes. AWS Lake Formation is available today and we’re excited to see how customers use it as one of the building blocks for growing and transforming their businesses and customer experiences.”

https://aws.amazon.com/lake-formation

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Broadcom to acquire Symantec's Enterprise Security for $10.7B

Broadcom agreed to acquire Symantec' Enterprise Security assets, which include the Symantec name, for $10.7 billion in cash. The acquired product portfolio includes enterprise endpoint security, web security services, cloud security and data loss prevention.

Hock Tan, President and Chief Executive Officer of Broadcom, said, "M&A has played a central role in Broadcom's growth strategy and this transaction represents the next logical step in our strategy following our acquisitions of Brocade and CA Technologies. Symantec's enterprise security business is recognized as an established leader in the growing enterprise security space and has developed some of the world's most powerful defense solutions that protect against today's evolving threat landscape and secure data from endpoint to cloud."

“This is a transformative transaction that should maximize immediate value to our shareholders while maintaining ownership in a pure play consumer cyber safety business with predictability, growth and strong consistent profitability. In addition it allows the Enterprise Security business to grow and compete on an enterprise platform with a worldwide sales and distribution reach which can service our existing customers,” said Rick Hill, Symantec's Interim President and CEO. He added, “It also allows our Norton LifeLock business, a world recognized leader in consumer and small business cyber safety to operate independently and give investors a clear understanding of the growth opportunity and strong financial performance.”

Symantec expects to issue a special dividend of $12.00 per share for shareholders.

Broadcom also reaffirmed its fiscal year 2019 revenue guidance of $22.5 billion, with $17.5 billion from semiconductor solutions and $5 billion from infrastructure software.

https://investors.broadcom.com/

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Broadcom debuts PCIe 4.0 Ethernet Adapters and Fibre Channel HBAs for AMD EPYC

Broadcom's NetXtreme E-Series Ethernet adapters and Emulex LPe35000-series HBAs are now supporting new AMD EPYC 7002 Series Processor-based systems- the world’s first x86 data center CPU with PCIe 4.0.

Broadcom says its 200GbE NetXtreme E-series and Gen 7 32GFC LPe35000-series are the world’s first portfolio of Ethernet adapters and Fibre Channel HBAs with support for PCIe 4.0.

“Thor and AMD EPYC 7002 Series Processors provide the best performing and most secure Ethernet connectivity and compute platform in the industry,” said Ed Redmond, senior vice president and general manager, Compute and Connectivity Division, Broadcom. “Thor, with 200GbE bandwidth and silicon root of trust, running on AMD PCIe 4.0 platforms, enable the industry to achieve greater levels of performance and security for hyperscale and enterprise data centers.”

“The Emulex LPe35000 HBA with PCIe 4.0 and NVMe over Fibre Channel doubles mission-critical workload bandwidth, while cutting host CPU utilization in half,” said Jeff Hoogenboom, general manager, Emulex Connectivity Division, Broadcom. “We are excited to work with AMD and our OEM customers to deliver the fastest, most secure Fibre Channel HBAs for enterprise workloads.”

Broadcom is now sampling Thor-based dual-port 100GbE and single-port 100GbE OCP 3.0, OCP 2.0, and PCIe NIC adapters to qualified customers.

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Lumentum posts stronger results even as sales to Huawei drop 25%

Lumentum reported net revenue of $404.6 million for its fiscal fourth quarter ended June 29, 2019, with GAAP net loss attributable to common stockholders of $(25.8) million, or $(0.34) per diluted share.

For comparison, net revenue for the preceding quarter was $432.9 million, with GAAP net loss of $(74.3) million, or $(0.98) per diluted share. A year ago, net revenue for the same period (fiscal fourth quarter of 2018) was $301.1 million, with GAAP net income of $25.7 million, or $0.40 per diluted share.

Optical communications revenue for the quarter was $356.8 billion, down 5.6% compared to the preceding quarter.

For the full fiscal year 2019, Lumentum reported net revenues of $1,565.3 million, with GAAP net loss attributable to common stockholders of $(37.9) million, or $(0.54) per diluted share.

"An eventful fourth quarter capped off an exciting fiscal 2019 during which we made significant progress against our strategic goals and achieved record results with revenue increasing 25% to more than $1.5 billion and operating margin expanding to more than 20%," said Alan Lowe, President and CEO. "With market leading positions in the growing telecom and 3D sensing markets, a datacom strategy that profitably benefits from growth in cloud and 5G wireless network deployments, a commercial lasers business that bucked market trends and grew to record levels, and a more profitable business model driven by the increased scale and synergies from the Oclaro acquisition, we are well positioned for fiscal 2020 and beyond."

Some highlights from Lumentum:

• Non-GAAP Operating Margin up 120 bps Q/Q on lower revenue
• Revenue declined 7% Q/Q to $404.6M
• Huawei sales declined 25% Q/Q primarily impacting telecom
• Lasers sales declined 13% Q/Q as expected due to customer inventory levels
• Datacom sales declined 28% Q/Q due to transceiver product line exits and divestiture
• Record datacom chip sales, which increased 11% Q/Q
• Record ROADM sales despite geopolitical disruption in the quarter
• Industrial & Consumer sales grew 13% Q/Q driven by growth in both industrial and 3D sensing

http://investor.lumentum.com/investors/default.aspx

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Amdocs acquires TTS Wireless, a mobile network engineering specialist

Amdocs has acquired TTS Wireless, a privately-owned provider of mobile network engineering services, specializing in network optimization, planning, and software-enabled solutions. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Amdocs plans to integrated TTS Wireless’ services at leading operators with its own Open 5G portfolio. This expanded offering will help operators accelerate and simplify the deployment of 5G networks with comprehensive network rollout solutions.

“This acquisition helps execute on Amdocs’ strategy of providing our customers around the world with an end-to-end 5G solution, so they can efficiently accelerate their plans to launch 5G networks, rapidly deploy the innovative new services this new technology enables, and benefit from new monetization models,” said Shuky Sheffer, Amdocs president and CEO. “At the same time, service providers also need to reduce cost per bit through automated operations, and smart network planning and optimization. The addition of TTS Wireless’ extensive network engineering services to the Amdocs Open 5G portfolio provides a compelling offering and highlights our commitment to be the leading independent provider of network services for 5G and the new generation of open cloud networks. This move will also enable operators around the world to benefit from the early 5G adoption experiences TTS Wireless has gained at leading carriers.”

“For over twenty years TTS Wireless has been successfully working with leading American operators,” said Lin Weng, TTS Wireless founder and CEO. “Together, TTS Wireless and Amdocs are well positioned to help operators accelerate their 5G journey with our expertise and experience in customer-focused design, delivery and optimization of mobile networks. With our highly-skilled network engineering and software development team joining forces with Amdocs, together we will strengthen the scope and scale of our offerings as we continue to deliver differentiated network services to Amdocs’ global base of service provider customers.”

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