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  3. Tesco is the closest thing that Europe has to Wal-Mart. The U. K. ’s leading food and household-goods retailer sells everything

Tesco is the closest thing that Europe has to Wal-Mart. The U. K. ’s leading food and household-goods retailer sells everything

admin2015-04-10  42
问题     Tesco is the closest thing that Europe has to Wal-Mart. The U. K. ’s leading food and household-goods retailer sells everything from bananas to banking services, all at low prices. Two weeks ago the chain added yet another product to its massive lineup-phone calls. Tesco won’t be the first European retailer to provide Internet phone services to its customers. But it will be the biggest. What’s more, Tesco isn’t trying to make money selling phone calls. It’s going to use cheap phone calls to sell you the things it actually does make money on—like clothing, food and household goods.
1. The rise of voice-over-Internet services
    Welcome to the 21st-century telecommunications business. It’s a place in which pretty much anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection can become your phone company. How did this happen? One word—VoIP. That’s "voice over Internet protocol" for the uninitiated, and it’s what companies like Skype and Vonage have been offering for a while now. VoIP turns your voice into just another form of digital data that can be sent through the Internet.
2. Big telecoms are suffering
    The shift is beginning to hit national telecoms and multinational mobile-phone companies. Just look at the last several months’ worth of profit warnings at companies like France Telecom, Deutsche Telekom and, most important, Vodafone, the largest mobile carrier in the world. It derives 80% of its revenue from voice, compared with an average of 55% for European telecoms, and is thus particularly vulnerable to the rise of voice-over-Internet services.
3. Phone services tend to be free
    While the telecommunications giants are suffering for a variety of reasons, the underlying problem is the same. Normally, products in highly competitive mass markets eventually become cheap cyclical commodities, which is what is happening to cell phones and all manner of consumer electronics.
4. Companies are offering cheap or free Internet phone services
    Over the last year or so, Google, Microsoft, ATT, AOL, British Telecom and hundreds of other companies of all kinds have launched VoIP services.
5. A new form of marketing
    In a world where the phone is a staple of daily life, providing this service becomes a new way to connect to customers, an intimate form of marketing.
    The commercial possibilities don’t stop there. Because once a customer is given his special handset and VoIP software, Tesco has made the leap from the grocery cart to the digital hub of the home. And in the Internet age, that’s where the money is. Once a company like Tesco is in your home, it can help you manage all sorts of things digitally— what you watch, who you speak to, what you buy, how your fridge gets stocked.
[A]But the ease of establishing Internet connections is pushing phone services beyond the commodity graveyard toward the purgatory of marketing giveaways, like those plastic toys that come free with your kids’ Happy Meal.
[B]"Tesco is a big and trusted brand, "notes Ovum telecom analyst Mark Main. "You buy your groceries from them, and maybe even have a Tesco credit card. So why not trust them to deliver your phone service?" That service becomes either a new way to get customers into the store, or to cement their loyalty. This is not only about simplifying phone services for people, but also about getting them used to the Tesco range of products and services, "says commercial manager Alex Freudmann, who is heading up the company’s Internet phone service.
[C]Witness the huge number of media and technology mergers and acquisitions over the last several months, most of them done with an eye to convergence. The largest deals included the SBC buyout of AT&T.
[D]For consumers, that means cheap or even free telephone calls. For companies, it means that phone services are no longer the purview of Ma Bell, BT or France Telecom. Anybody from cable conglomerates to media firms to retailers to garage start-ups can handle your voice traffic.
[E]In the U. K. , the major electronics retailer Dixons has a service; one Italian newspaper now sells phone calls. Like Tesco, all these companies are offering cheap phone connections as a way to lure you into buying their other products and services.
[F]Largely as a result, Vodafone has seen its share price fall 17% over the last six months.
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