The investment of these four giants - which together served a total of 51 million 661,904 fixed telephony, broadband and pay television accessories until June, plus a handful of cellular lines through the virtual operator modality that they also package - is the higher in brightness, as regards the first half of the year.
Izzi Telecom, Megacable, Telmex and Totalplay, the four giants of fixed networks in Mexico by customer volume, revenue and network expansion, made investments for a total of 23,614 million pesos (US$ 1,207 million) during the first half of the year. 2024, in a context of accumulated inflation of 1.7% for that period and also in the face of a depreciation of 12.53% for the peso against the dollar so far in 2024, situations that make the components for the development of telecommunications infrastructure in the country more expensive. .
The investment of these four giants - which together served a total of 51 million 661,904 fixed telephony, broadband and pay television accessories until June, plus a handful of cellular lines through the virtual operator modality that they also package - is the highest in five years, in respect to the first half of the year.
The investment in the first half of 2024 is equivalent to US$ 1,228 million dollars and is 43.97% above the investments made by those same companies five years ago, in the first half of 2020 (16,402 million pesos), when the The health emergency due to the Covid-19 pandemic impacted the economy and network deployments in Mexico, although the telecommunications industry faces other obstacles in 2024, such as high costs, insecurity and uncertainty due to the possible disappearance of the sector regulator, as well as challenges unique to each one. company in particular.
In a cumulative total of the first semesters of the years 2020 to 2024, these four companies have added investments of 95,707 million pesos, as much as 4,795 million dollars and money that basically went to the construction, expansion and maintenance of wired networks over fiber. through different places in Mexico, between transportation networks, access networks and metropolitan rings; so many kilometers as to indigest the entire Chihuahua of fiber.
The investment of five years for the first semester has allowed, for example, Megacable to have a business in volume size similar to the entire Bolivian market; Totalplay being larger than the entire fixed market in Ecuador, also in volume; Izzi Telecom has more subscriptions than the entire population of Uruguay and Telmex has as many accesses as in all of Chile.
More dimensioned the relevance of the investments made by these companies in the Mexican fixed network market, the almost 591 million dollars that Telmex invested in the first half of 2024, is 47.75% above the 400 million dollars that its parent company América Móvil invests in its entire business in Argentina in one year, although both markets also present different realities.
In comparisons between the first half of 2024 and the first half of 2020, according to data from the companies themselves, Izzi Telecom reduced its investment in networks by 44% in this period; Megacable raised it by 97.56%; Telmex did so by 87.27% and Totalplay lowered it by 1.80 percent.
But this does not mean that two companies stopped investing, but rather that their business plans forced them to make early investments or that the current economic context in Mexico made them rethink their degrees of investment and space them out over time.
In fact, in historical data, also according to the companies' reports to the BMV and Biva, in the accumulated of the first semesters from 2020 to 2024, the company Totalplay deployed investments for 39,219 million pesos, compared to 27,297 million pesos of Telmex for the same period, which in turn its financial losses, largely caused by regulatory policy, has been forced to rethink its investments.
Historical data also cites that Megacable Holdings is a company that has kept its investments in Mexico constant, at an average of 5.1 billion pesos for the first half of 2022 to 2024, periods that correspond to its 2022-2027 investment plan. . to become an entirely national company.
In the first half of 2024, Izzi Telecom invested a total of 808 million pesos; Megacable went to the market with 5,103 million pesos; Telmex deployed 11,495 million pesos, while Totalplay invested 6,208 million pesos, but all these figures are better understood when you know how much each company invested for each of its users.
