What non-US companies are key players in the industry?
Summary:
France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom announced on Friday a new joint venture called Buyin through which they hope to save millions of euros per year on purchases of telecoms, network, and software equipment. The companies have previously worked together in U.K on a joint venture called Everything Everywhere. Buyin will start operation in Paris and Bonn this Monday (Oct 17, 2011). This plan was first announced in March and is predicted to save at least 3 billion euros by 2015, in part due to partnerships with competitors in the market.
Analysis:
Global involvement by media broadcasters differs greatly. For example, according to its website, Comcast provides service exclusively in the United States. This is a trend followed by many cable companies. DirecTV has a slightly wider geographical range, offering service to the US and latin america. Newspapers/journals, such as the Wall Street Journal and the Economist have a global presence despite being focused and associated primarily with one location. This difference may be in due to the difference in purposes that they serve - the latter category deals in large part with affairs that concern businesspeople around the world, while cable is targeted more to people within a specific geographic region.
The two telecommunications companies dealt with in this article likewise have a huge global presence. As mentioned, while they are based in France and Germany, respectively, they have worked on a project in the U.K.. The two are some of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. France Telecom services countries in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, while Deutsche has a world-wide presence. T-mobile, a name most Americans are familiar with, is owned by this German media company. Since telecommunications is meant to make communication easier across the world, it makes sense that the large players would be strong internationally. This distribution of globality supports the idea that its the purpose of a specific branch of media that influences whether many companies within it deal internationally and to what extent.
Note: All information was found on the official sites of the companies mentioned.
In the post, you mentioned that T-mobile was owned by Deutsche Telekom, a fact which shocked me almost as much the revelation that Random House was also owned by a German corporation. Since these companies were formed after privatization of state-owned monopolies in the neo-liberal era, I imagine that might be part of the reason these European firms have a large international presence; they've always had control of the home market, and now that they have the opportunity to expand, they can more quickly move to expand internationally.
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