M2M specialist signs up new Japanese car manufacturer customers; says healthcare accounts for just 2% of its revenue.
Telenor’s machine-to-machine (M2M) subsidiary Telenor Connexion revealed this week that 60% of its revenue comes from the automotive industry, while only 2% comes from the healthcare market.
Gwenn Larsson, head of marketing and partner management for Telenor Connexion, explained on the sidelines of Mobile World Congress that of that 60% automotive revenue, 24% is generated through commercial fleet management.
“We continue to do deals with automotive players that are outside our footprint,” she said, adding that Telenor Connexion is in talks with two major Japanese car manufacturers to be announced soon. She later said that one of those manufacturers is especially focused on the truck sector.
However, “m-health is a really interesting, but at the same time, a really difficult vertical in terms of who is taking the cost and who is paying for the equipment,” due to the governmental nature of the healthcare system, said Fredric Liljestrom, senior vice president of sales.
Larsson insisted that part of the success of Telenor Connexion stems from its ability to leverage the assets and partnerships of its parent company, while still operating as a separate company.
“Most MNOs have created separate organisations but not separate companies… all their machine-to-machine groups are buried amongst larger departments“, she explained. “[However], we don’t go out and negotiate separate roaming agreements,” she said.
M2M has been a key area of focus at Mobile World Congress this week, with companies looking in particular at the automotive and power industries. Qualcomm predicted that operators could develop data plans for highway traffic in the future; AT&T announced a partnership with U.S. energy firm Ice Energy; and Telekom Austria on Wednesday forecast that it will have more than 10 million M2M connections on its network by 2015.
