Telecom Corporative structures

The telecommunications industry in contrast to some other industries is wide spread. This characteristic of the industry makes it have a lot of cultural differences and different business ethics. So corporate structures in this industry need to be chosen very carefully and taking in consideration hundreds of external factors that vary if the companies are local, national or global.

The telecom companies can’t stick to a single structure because it is likely impossible that one strategy could work for the marketing, finance or implementing the correct prices for different countries. In Latin America for example the prices are lower than in the United States, if a telecom company would charge the US prices to Latin American countries the demand for the services would decrease since the majority of the people in those countries can’t pay the same prices as the people in US. In my interview with a global telecom company’s manager, I learned that mobile carriers in general tend to use a hybrid structure, a combination of vertical and horizontal structure to manage their foreign part of the company. In this way companies that use this structure are able to have their foreign part of their company with their own marketing, finance or management sectors, as horizontal structured companies do. But in this case each sector those foreign parts of those global companies(finance, marketing, management) have to report to those same sectors of the main company. As I said before not every company can use the same structure so there are also companies within this industry that use vertical or horizontal structures too.