The USA is not the world, get it?

Steven Den Beste of Captain Clueless fame, is making a classic mistake in a discussion about global corporations.  He was expressing surprise and concerning that Vodafone could make profits greater than Verizon and Microsoft.  Verizon is, of course, a US "carrier" - a reasonably sized one, which happens, of course, to be 45% owned by Vodafone.  Vodafone themselves have over 146m subscribers worldwide and are on target to make over £10bn in profit this year.

Steven comments: I used to work in that industry. All the cellular operators have immense capital investments in operating equipment which have to be amortized, and for a long time all of them routinely operated in the red while building up their businesses. If Vodafone has suddenly become a "cash cow", it suggests that they're coasting and not keeping up their investment in equipment for upgrades and to improve coverage.

Well, I *do* work in that industry and yes, cellular operators do have immense capital investments in operating equipment.  However, the time when they, with the exception of H3G "routinely" run in the red while "building up their business" is quite a long way behind us.  It has been for about 4 years now since the key European op-cos hit saturation point in their local markets.  They've got their business, they're a long way beyond that now.  The problem is the US is still a long way off that point, mostly because of the inept way the roll out of cell phone services was handled in the US during the 80s and 90s and a certain US company that Mr Den Beste used to work for.

Vodafone has not suddenly become a cash cow.  It lost a vast amount of money a few years ago in the lunacy that was the 3G auction.  However, thanks to some killer marketing and a goood business model it was able to write off the vast cost of 3G a couple of years ago and get on with dealling with those 146 million customers.

I have another North American customer who struggles with the concept that any other company could be even close to their size, not just that they could be larger and with more day-to-day customers.  It's a bad case of tunnel vision that ought to be watched out for.

Ahem.  Sorry, the rant endeth here.