Capacity survey says Brexit bad for business
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Capacity survey says Brexit bad for business

Despite Brexit causing uncertainty in the telecoms market, with Spanish telecoms giant Telefónica now reviewing and delaying the sale of its UK wireless unit O2 over fears of market volatility, there is still an air of optimism.

Telefónica was planning to announce the IPO of its infrastructure unit Telxius next week to raise $1.6bn, however, it may delay this by a week in the hopes the markets will stabilise.

French telecoms company Orange has said it plans to keep its several group offices in the United Kingdom, which employ about 900 people, despite Britain's vote to leave. The company said since it did not operate in the UK consumer market Brexit had no impact on its financial exposure.

Capacity survey

Capacity carried out a brief survey on the UK’s decision on the 23rd June to leave the European Union – what has become known as Brexit. The results show that respondents think Brexit is bad for their businesses and details areas where they might struggle. Here's a sneak peak of the results for you. Full survey results will be published imminently.

The majority of respondents to the Capacity survey see Brexit as bad for their businesses. However, the industry seems to be adopting a positive attitude to a decision they would rather had not been taken.

At this stage reaction is calm and concerned rather than overly pessimistic – this is reflected in the high number of respondents who thought that Brexit may have a ‘neutral’ effect on their businesses.

The regional split in opinion was even, with 24% of UK respondents, 22% of EU respondents and 21% of total international respondents being of the opinion that the result was overwhelmingly negative.

While 12% of overall respondents thought that the vote was slightly-to-overwhelmingly positive a surprisingly large number, 33% of UK respondents and 35% of EU respondents, thought that the decision was neutral. This may reflect the most entrepreneurial slice of the survey respondents.

Overall, 62% of UK respondents thought that the vote was negative, 39% of EU respondents thought it was negative with 49% of overall respondents also thinking it was negative.

This split was followed through when we asked respondents to say how the decision would affect their companies. 48% of UK respondents and 31% of European respondents thought that the decision would adversely affect their companies. However, the same number of UK respondents thought that the effects would be neutral, while 52% of EU respondents said it would have no effect.

Respondents thought that there was little positive to Brexit, although they did highlight data privacy, content sharing and mobile roaming as areas which may positively impact their respective businesses. Interestingly, UK respondents voted as its main area for hope as 'data privacy', with 14% of votes, which conversely was one of the least highlighted areas of positivity by EU respondents, with 4% of votes. A similar story can be seen with 17% of EU respondents stating 'content sharing' will positively affect their businesses, while only 5% of UK respondents believe so.

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