Tag Archives: Telia

October 13, 2024 · 18:01

What is real?

That is at times the question. There was an image on LinkedIn (see below) and I had taken notice of it. Yet today on LinkedIn we were given a rather large recruiting drive which seems odd, but it doesn’t need to be. The line “Amazon plans to cut 14,000 manager positions by 2025” directly opposes the recruitment drive on which 150 people applied for (as a presented fact).

We see all the big boys dumping staff around 120,000 of them and the others are planning to dump a significant amount of people (numbers unknown). One of them I know ‘personally’, it is the Swedish telecom company Telia. We were given a month ago “Swedish carrier Telia is set to cut 3,000 jobs this year as part of cost reduction measures. The proposed cuts would equate to around 15 percent of its workforce, and deliver annual savings of 2.6 billion Swedish crowns ($253 million), the operator said today (September 4)” the larger issue is not that they are dwindling down staff, a 15% decrease is significant. It is the other side of the coin that I cannot see at the moment. That 15% might be all over the place, but the turnover is that a company with 15% less staff tends to have issues all over the board. Perhaps it works out, perhaps not. But the issue that I see with 3,000 persons saving them 2.6 billion Swedish crowns is a more significant issue. You see that amounts to a personal saving of 866K per person and no one in Sweden makes that much (well almost no one) this means that Telia is downsizing a lot, as such we need to take a look at “As of 2023, the company had a market share of roughly 31.5 percent” This implies (implied does not mean factual) that Telia is downsizing a few more branches and that now leads us to a much larger setting. Another source on this gives us “I envisage that this intended approach will not only result in a Telia that is simpler and faster in decision-making and commercial execution, but also help us to grow our business and generate enough cash so that we can make necessary investments and cover our dividend, as we remain committed to our dividend policy” I feel uneasy on this. Especially the statement “we remain committed to our dividend policy”, now this might (and likely is) merely me, but it could also mean that Sweden is ripe for players like STC (Saudi Telecom Company) and Huawei (Ren Zhengfei) to take up the baton to wave a much larger change in Europe. I expect that Huawei might show links to China Telecom (a speculation, not a fact). You see, as these companies all dwindle down, these staff members (requiring a job) might be a nice niche for these two players. Saudi’s STC is already in Europe “Saudi Telecommunication Company’s subsidiary TAWAL officially began operations in Europe in August of that year. In September 2023, it was announced STC Group had acquired a 9.9% stake in the Madrid-headquartered multinational telecommunications company, Telefónica, S.A..” When you consider this stage, and Sweden is the next target, Finland and Norway are not far away. I saw some data on STC entering Slovenia (might have been Slovakia) and that puts the option of Poland on the table, at that point Saudi Arabia has a clear path from the South of Europe all to the far north. And with that on the road, Huawei will have negated a much larger win, it took them some time but with this in place America is out of the race in Europe. All that bantering of fear mongers (never showing any evidence) and now these players will succumb to a much larger setting. Mind you, I am speculating. I have no evidence of this. And when we consider that IBM and Cisco are also on the list, the internet overhaul could become a lot larger. We say ‘it won’t get this far’ but the stage where they could be replaced by other players There is a Chinese version of Cisco (not sure how that words), but the stage becomes that Huawei and STC would have a clear path taking over servicing the European population of 449 million people in the EU. It is what I would attempt to do and America losing 120,000 people to ‘streamlining’ businesses will not help. So what happens next? Well if this impacts Telecom in Europe, especially a well maintained network, America will lose more and more and now they have no data to look into, that implies that Google, Meta and Microsoft will get less data and that will hinder their actions in the long run as well, especially as the Department of Justice is seeking to slice and dice Google. In that setting Huawei and their Harmony OS NEXT will get a great option and as that vibrates through the Middle East and Asia, Huawei will get the sweetest revenge on America to start. In this setting (as I personally see it) Germany and France will soon count the chickens they have and the eggs coming from this setting. I feel that Germany will turn first, but that might merely be my view on the matter.

What is a given is that this is merely a setting as I see it (optionally very wrong), but as Saudi Arabia via BRICS makes more inroads into Europe, America will essentially lose these income streams. And that is the beginning of the end for America and its $35,000,000,000,000 debt. There is every consideration that more then 20% loss of revenue implies that America can no longer pay the interest bill. A setting I saw coming a mile away (5 years ago), so I do not see any hindrance to this scenario (which doesn’t make it correct).

And in all this China is seeking ‘revenge’ on the accusations America spouted and Saudi Arabia is aiming to become a technology hub and they are well underway to make that so.

So in this day and age of redundancies, there is a larger group of people almost desperate to find a new gig and there these two players can find all kinds of people ready and willing to give their new employer the best that they had. Will it be so? Time will tell.

I want to congratulate Vancouver as they join us on this Sunday and the rest on having an equally fine day.

Too big a workforce?

Yes, there is a speculative setting where this happens. The BBC revealed yesterday (at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-65305165) the clear message ‘EY cuts 3,000 jobs in US blaming ‘overcapacity’’, and I wonder what really the issue is. You see when you have to shed 10-20 jobs there are all kinds of explanations. But when you shed 3000 jobs something else is going on. I wonder what it is. And there is plenty to question. You see on their website they claim “Apply now. We recommend applying early as we will be recruiting on an ongoing basis, and positions will close once filled. View the current opportunities below. There are a small number of programs which have closing dates. Once we open for those programs, their closing dates will be listed underneath the program.” My issue is that when you shed THAT many jobs, you need to adjust your career page as well. I personally think that this is a job for HR, but that remains debatable. When you shed 3000 jobs and your career pages imply that it is business as usual another setting comes to mind. To be honest I am not sure what it is, but something is there. In the 90’s and ten years ago it was in IT and several other places about shedding the expensive staff members and getting cheap labour (graduates). Now there are a few issues. The first is that Ernst and Young has over 360,000 people. This means that only 1% is affected and that happens. Yet this only affects US staff and the number I gave you is global. There are issues in banking and that could be a setting, but whatever I give you is speculative and might not apply. But in the US we see that there is slowing but they are surpassing the numbers, as such these numbers do not add up. But the BBC gives us a handle. We are given “The move comes as corporate America is bracing for an economic downturn”, OK I can get along with that, it merely implies that EY was ahead of the curve which is never a bad thing. And they are not alone, we are also given “Accenture is slashing 19,000 jobs or roughly 2.5% of staff globally, while McKinsey is reportedly cutting about 1,400 roles or 3% of its employees” and there is more bad news, but not for EY. You see, in an age of aging losing that much staff might become counterproductive later on. We see the events that call for an economic downturn and that is fine, this happens. But in other news we see Europe going on (slightly less god than now) and the Middle East and Asia is making waves, larger positive waves. I would think that retrenching staff in the latter two areas might give a raise to better times down the track and optionally sooner. OK, I am pretty much alone in this. Most BI people say I am bonkers and they might be right. But the idea of losing qualified staff in a world where relocating them might offer more seems weird. You see, only two days ago the Financial Times gave us ‘Dubai court orders KPMG to pay $231mn for Abraaj fund audit failure’ according to the courts KPMG dropped the ball, which in sales terms means that their customers are looking around. That could be good news for EY and we do get that these grounds are not the same, but to get parties shifting into these areas implies that other areas need filling up and losing 3000 staff is not a healthy way to fill places and relocate people to fertile accountancy lands. Even as we see that most are shed from the consulting division, the truth is that most consultants are versatile, there are grounds of not losing that much staff, but that is purely a personal view on the matter. Consider the cowboy stage of cyber divisions, the need for consultants are more and more pressing, not merely on the Cyber part, but on the price-tag setting. That part could need addressing quite soon and that is where we find that EY cannot vie for such clients as they just told 3000 people to vacate the building. That I how I see it, but I could be massively wrong here and I am not an accountant. And when you see that Accenture is ridding itself of 19,000 jobs implies a larger failing all over the field. In 2003 Telia shed thousands of jobs, as far as I can tell they never rose to the old Telia, but that was merely me seeing it as I personally saw it. Is it the wrong thing to do for EY? I cannot say, but to shed 3000 jobs in the US implies more than just Economic downturn, it implies that they are already losing customers and long term projects, or they aren’t gaining long term projects, which implies that there is another issue at EY, not merely overcapacity. Yet, this is a personal view on the matter and I have no idea on how they could solve it, but as I see things around me I wonder what consultants are doing not merely to get the job done, but how to get new clients and that is the stage for the next article, because the story I wrote on February 24th 2022 ‘Red Flags’ gets a new lease on life. About that more in the next article, lets see if people actually learn from their mistakes.

Have fun (I will)

Explicitly exposed

There is an issue pushing to the forefront. In the upcoming elections, certain parties are playing a different game. The article ‘Facebook and YouTube face tough new laws on extremist and explicit video‘ (at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/24/facebook-youtube-tough-new-laws-extremist-explicit-video-europe) is showing a story that is not just incomplete, it is not telling us about certain dangers we all face and it is not coming from extremists. You might have missed it all and that is fine, but you need to be aware of the mess that some parties are increasing. The quote: “European Union ministers approved proposals from the European Commission on Tuesday“, now the article gives us that the rules are not yet public, because they are still talking about it, which is fine. Let those people get their act together before presenting it, I have no issue with that. It is the ‘trialogue’ part in the article that beckons view. The negotiators from the EC, the European parliament and the Council of the European Union are in the midst of this and we will at some point hear what is agreed upon. What I find utterly boggling is how the people were left in the dark regarding Article 50 for years (during the Grexit era) and we now see an overreaction regarding “forcing them to remove hate speech and sexually explicit videos or face steep fines“, now, I have no issue (within legal limits) on fines for Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Yet what those players are not realising and not considering is that THEY themselves wanted the smartphone era, they wanted connectivity, they USED those options to get new taxation, new revenues and new technological iterations, yet they are in denial of the opposite side of the scales and there has never been a balance in any place of used technology where it applied. Yet they knew better! I know for a fact (from mere history books), that porn was not part of the first photograph ever taken, it was definitely part of the first 50 photographs taken in history. With movie the same way. There is Etruscan erotic art 900 BC and the clock goes back a lot further, so we knew that it would happen. Now for the most, it gets stopped, yet at times the filters fail. This is because there is a global wave, you see, the statistics gives us that in the recent past there was a total upload of 60 hours of movies EVERY MINUTE. That is just YouTube, there is no way to see how much the other channels in different formats operate at present. What these overreacting individuals seen to be oblivious about is the stuff that they find ‘objectionable’. They will happily steer away from every bogus sales and scam video uploaded as those do not show breasts, penises, vagina’s or suicide bombers. Video’s on how to get wealth with so much certainty. On how the next hype whilst getting your neighbours involved is not a Ponzi scheme. The list goes on, but they will not act there. Or how the people are fooled by ‘YouTube Marketing Training Scams‘. No, they do not care about the thousands that get fooled by slick pitches that could have fooled many in the actual industry. No, the tits are out and we see how the outrage is in a state of overreaction. You see, when these ‘commissions’ start getting traction, the players will suddenly find that these large corporations will insist on other solutions, and the commission will not be able to do that. Because on that point, privacy will actually stop. Now, when it comes to stopping some of the video low lives that exploit the people for personal greed, I will be in full support. Yet these European nations will then learn that they were alas unable to prosecute those people. The mere levels of hypocrisy here is just too sickening for words.

Now, we have two issues. Yes, we do want to stop extremist video’s and I feel 100% certain that Google wants that too. Yet video is about content and identifying an extremist video is a lot harder than one thinks. censoring 60 hours of movies every minute is just nearly impossible. If it is set to priority it will just be another way to stop net neutrality, because the advertisers would want to get checked first. Meaning that an engine of free speech will be taken away from the people. The question that everyone is skating around is the number of explicit video’s produced and where from, as well as the original and numbers of extremist video’s. Now consider the element of Extremism. What if it is an imam giving a Muslim lecture? How could we see that it was extremist in nature? There are so many outlets and methods of communicating these dangers that the setting is (as I personally see it) not about fines, or about stopping any of this. It is about setting a stage to gain control of a media, where the some and the fat cats want control. And in this specific setting Google and Facebook are not the fat cats on the menu. So who are these ‘ménage-a-trialogue’ people facilitating to? You see, when you realise the 60 hours of video a minute, the three examples given in the article are less than 0.000,000,23% of all uploads and that is merely for one day of uploads. This is as useless as trying to get gun control in the US, guns do not kill people, people kill people. So as the criminal offenders film their events and as we can see that it is statistically impossible to prevent this from happening, why are the three parties having large lunches, uncanny levels of expenditure and levels of remunerations that go beyond most incomes, why is this happening?

I believe that this is merely to set levels of control, levels that do not benefit anyone at all, perhaps the church, which would start an entirely different debate. We are already moving towards a new technological setting of non-repudiation online, but the levels of settings, whilst we also know that hackers can get online ending up leaving the blame with some innocent granny who has internet is just not the way to go. The articles do show my side as partial evidence in the final paragraph. As we see: “The proposals, which fall under the digital single market legislation, also include a quota of 30% of European films and TV shows on streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Video, up from the 20% originally proposed by the EC“, so if this is about bandwidth and streaming, we now see a different picture. One, why the hell do I get to pay for some Netflix need, one that I do not want in the first place. And with “Member states will also be able to require video-sharing platforms to contribute financially to the production of European works in the country where they are established and also where they target audiences” we see that video sharing now comes at a price of funding other matters? How will that work? 50,000 students (likely that times 500), all creating their video channel, in a field of their passion, hoping to get discovered and actually make their passion a reality on real life on TV for all their audience to see on the large TV. So as they do this, why is there a need of funding?

Also, when we realise that this is already in play, why would Google need to give 20 hours a minute of streaming time to European films? Will that be free of charge? I am going with ‘NO’ as the answer from the movie creators, so this will be about money, about surcharging that will push the non-viability of net neutrality because it is now about limiting bandwidth with a value to the mandatory availability of other materials.

So as these players are explicitly exposed, their ‘balls to the wall’ so to say, we should request the names of the members of this obscene ‘ménage-a-trialogue’, so that we can get some art going. Perhaps we can get Lars von Trier to make some new work called ‘Nymphomaniac Politicologica’, or perhaps ‘For a few Terabytes more‘ with music from Ennio Morricone. You see, in a few second I added hours of European promiscuous non-explicit art of a European nature. I am willing to bet the house that these people would prefer to remain in the shadows, because that is seen when we consider the quote “discussions between negotiators” in a time when all those imaginative attaining politicians, this is a setting between negotiators? Who missed that part of the article?

Yet it is not all gloom and doom. The quote ““We need to take into account new ways of watching videos, and find the right balance to encourage innovative services, promote European films, protect children and tackle hate speech in a better way,” said Andrus Ansip, EC vice-president for the digital single market” is not one of negativity. Yet as the watching video’s options is set on a shifting scale. New connection methods, new stream utilising options and new ways to offer other materials is in the corner of innovation, keeping that door open is the only way that innovation hits us. The one element in all this is the data provider, that was the simplest of issues to figure out. The issue is however seen, not in Google or Facebook et al, it is seen in the facilitation of the data stream itself, the ISP and they know they cannot get to the stream provider as that person is in it for the money and that provider has local government protection. KPN in the Netherlands, BT in the United Kingdom, Telia in Sweden, Mobile providers all over the European states and so on. The moment they go anywhere near this is when they get cut from everything and the censor marketing police will shout fire, rape, help, whatever they will shout to get the limelight. In all this Netflix might need more bandwidth and better deals, so they will happily facilitate this path. I am merely wondering why Andrus Ansip is happy to facilitate his voice for all this. You see it is not up to YouTube to promote European films, it is up to the film maker to creatively facilitate marketing for their movie. So, perhaps it is less about the DataStream, perhaps it is in equal measure getting proper television to look beyond the Marvel movies. When I was a lot less old than today, I would watch Simon van Collum (Netherlands), Jo Röpcke (Belgium) and Barry Norman (United Kingdom). I would dream of becoming like them, making a living talking about movies. Alas, I never had that option and I happily reviewed Video Games for a decade. These people were giants and they fell away whilst no one filled those shoes. So for the internet to pick that up is a little bit a stretch. And as YouTube is probably one of the most innovative services of this century, we could start asking a few more questions regarding the push that we see here. So as we see the one element in this that can be answered immediately, we see “tackle hate speech in a better way“, which can be solved on the spot. Because my response here is a non-diplomatic: “Clean up the Criminal Justice mess you currently have, and properly identify and prosecute those shits!“. You see? The issue is now solved, yet it is not, because European law is an utter mess and as Strasbourg will do too little to tackle the option as it is too restrictive on free speech, we see that the European Commission is stopping their own European commission to achieve anything ground breaking. In all this, as I personally see it, for those who need it there is a fictive solution in retrenching net neutrality that is no longer neutral and the European Commission Gravy train could run for years on this element alone. So as we see this level of facilitation, the term ménage-a-trialogue is a lot closer to the truth than some consider it to be. And as long as those balls to the wall don’t make it to YouTube, we will see no result that is a solution or fair, European would merely be receiving a lot more Netflix, but at what price?

Tag Archives: Telia

What is real?

Too big a workforce?

Explicitly exposed

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