• Intel set to cull 20% of its staff – report
• AT&T reports sales, earnings and subs uptick in Q1
• Rakuten Mobile and AST SpaceMobile claim satellite first in Japan 

In today’s industry news roundup: Speculation mounts that the new Intel CEO is set to cut 20% of the chip giant’s staff as he delivers the vendor’s earnings report on Thursday; AT&T exceeds expectations as it reports sales, earnings and subscriber gains for its mobile and fibre broadband services; Rakuten Mobile says it has completed the first satellite-to-smartphone video call in Japan with its satellite operator partner AST SpaceMobile; and much more!

Thursday looks like it will be a watershed day for under-pressure chip giant Intel as the company announces its first earnings report with Lip-Bu Tan at the helm and with speculation swirling (courtesy of Bloomberg) that the new CEO, who was appointed in March, will announce plans to cut more than 20% of the company’s staff in an effort to lower costs and restructure the vendor. Intel, which in August last year announced plans to cut 15,000 jobs as part of a plan to reduce costs by $10bn, ended 2024 with 108,900 employees. The speculation comes only a week after Reuters reported, citing an internal memo, that Tan had “flattened” the company’s senior reporting structure and promoted the general manager of the networking and edge group, Sachin Katti, to be CTO and head of AI. When he was appointed, Tan noted in the official appointment announcement that the Intel management had “significant opportunities to remake our business in ways that serve our customers better and create value for our shareholders. Intel has a powerful and differentiated computing platform, a vast customer installed base and a robust manufacturing footprint that is getting stronger by the day as we rebuild our process technology roadmap. I am eager to join the company and build upon the work the entire Intel team has been doing to position our business for the future.” And in a separate blog published at the time, he noted that “under my leadership, Intel will be an engineering-focused company. We will push ourselves to develop the best products, listen intently to our customers and hold ourselves accountable to the commitments we make so that we build trust.” Then, shortly after he slipped into the hot seat, Tan sent a note to customers, staff, shareholders, the market and the public in which he promised to make the company great again by reviving Intel’s original model and culture as an engineering-based behemoth focusing on chip technology development whilst cutting costs, trimming bureaucracy and selling non-core assets. And on 14 April, Intel announced it had sold a 51% stake in its Altera FPGA (field programmable gate array) business, which was spun out as a separate company last year, to private equity firm Silver Lake Partners for $4.46bn. Now, it seems, the Intel family is about to find out who Tan wants to join him on his mission to rebuild the highly critical chip firm.    

AT&T reported better-than-expected first-quarter financials on Wednesday, with operating revenues of $29.56bn, up 2.4% year on year, adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) of $11.5bn, up by 4.4%, and operating income of $6.99bn, up 3.6%. It generated mobility service revenues of $16.65bn, up 4.1%, thanks in part to postpaid phone net adds of 324,000, which compares drastically to Verizon’s first-quarter postpaid phone net losses of 289,000 as reported on Tuesday. AT&T ended March with 117.96 million mobile subscribers, up from 114.51 million a year ago. Consumer wireline operating revenues were up by 5.1% to $3.52bn,  thanks in part to the addition of 261,000 fibre broadband customers, a gain that took its fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) customer base to almost 9.6 million. It’s worth noting that of that FTTH total, 3.9 million are “converged” customers that also subscribe to an AT&T mobility service. AT&T’s fibre access network now passes 29.5 million business and consumer locations (including 23.8 million consumer premises), up from 27.1 million a year ago. The operator also made progress with its 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) service: In the first quarter it signed up 181,000 customers for its AT&T Internet Air FWA service to take the total to 803,000. That number is much lower than the FWA customer bases of T-Mobile US and Verizon as AT&T launched its service much later than its rivals. But it wasn’t all about broadband gains for AT&T, as it recorded a decline of 124,000 non-fibre fixed broadband users to take that total down to 4.52 million. Also heading south were AT&T’s business wireline service revenues, down by 9.1% to $4.47bn as the telco, like its peers, suffers an ongoing decline in legacy service sales. “Our business fundamentals remain strong, and we are uniquely positioned to win in this dynamic and competitive market,” said John Stankey, AT&T chairman and CEO. “We are growing the right way as customers continue to choose AT&T Fiber and 5G wireless for connectivity they can rely on, guaranteed or we’ll make it right. The priorities we laid out at our 2024 Analyst & Investor Day have not changed, and we continue to operate our business to achieve the financial plan and capital returns we outlined in December,” added the CEO. 

Rakuten Mobile says it has successfully completed the first broadband video call between a regular, unmodified smartphone device in Japan and a low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite, which in this instance was part of the AST SpaceMobile constellation. “The video call marks a major step toward the launch of Rakuten Saikyo Satellite Service powered by AST SpaceMobile, which aims to expand connectivity across Japan – including mountainous regions, remote islands and in emergency situations, such as areas affected by natural disasters,” noted Rakuten Mobile, which is one of AST SpaceMobile’s many telco investors. Rakuten Mobile aims to launch its commercial satellite-to-smartphone service, offering “voice calls, video calls and more”, in the fourth quarter of 2026. Read more. 

Scandinavian telco Tele2 saw largely flat first-quarter sales but improved margins as a result of the cost-cutting measures introduced by the operator’s new management team, the company has reported. Like-for-like end-user service revenues of SEK5.4bn ($561m) increased by 1% year on year, while underlying like-for-like EBITDA (after leases) of SEK 2.7bn increased by 6%. 

Nokia and Saudi neutral host network operator Tawal have completed what they claim is the “world’s first live demonstration of a multi-tenant, shareable Open RAN edge-cloud platform, allowing mobile operators and large enterprises to launch high-performance 5G services at significantly lower costs than previously possible”. According to towers firm Tawal, the demo shows how it can “offer active infrastructure-as-a-service while operators enjoy significant savings and futureproof their networks with open, cloud-native flexibility. Nokia’s anyRAN architecture uniquely delivers the trusted performance required to run anyRAN workloads on an open edge cloud,” the company noted in this announcement. Tawel believes it can meet customer needs by operating “spectrum-agnostic Open RAN baseband and radio assets so multiple service providers share the same edge cloud platform, reducing energy consumption, freeing spectrum and shrinking the digital divide for businesses and communities nationwide”. Abdulrahman Al Moaiqel, chief commercial officer at Tawal, noted: “Neutral hosts must add value beyond steel and concrete. By partnering with Nokia, we can offer Saudi operators an on-demand, pay-as-you-grow 5G platform that cuts their TCO [total cost of ownership] and accelerates digital transformation for the Kingdom’s giga projects.” Mikko Lavanti, Nokia’s senior VP for the Middle East and Africa, added: “Moving from a tower company model to a fully fledged network company demands technology that combines openness with proven performance. Our anyRAN approach lets Tawal mix and match vendors at the cloud layer while still guaranteeing the ultra-reliable, low-latency experience operators and end users expect.”

– The staff, TelecomTV