We're getting very good at the business we're trying to escape

APAC's techco transformation is being judged by the wrong number. 

Two years ago, my team delivered a transformation programme I was proud of. On time, close to budget, cloud-native, every box on the architecture diagram ticked green. It also added almost nothing to revenue. We had rebuilt the engine and forgotten that the board had paid for the car to go somewhere.

I have since concluded that we measured the whole programme against the wrong number, and watching Asia Pacific over the last two years, I do not think we were alone.

The regional backdrop is unforgiving. Revenue was broadly flat across APAC in 2024 and 2025 is tracking the same. Margins are drifting down. Capex is being cut, not because transformation is finished, but because boards have stopped believing it will pay. Almost every operator in the region has declared a techco ambition. Very few can point to the revenue line that proves it.

It is worth remembering what the word actually means. The industry defines a techco as an operator that behaves like a high-performing technology company: customer-centric, software and AI led, agile in how it builds, and drawing a growing share of revenue from digital services rather than commoditised connectivity.

Read that definition carefully and you notice it is at least as much commercial as it is technical. The cloud-native stack is one half of it. The ability to create and sell new revenue is the other. Most of us have been building the first half and quietly skipping the second.

First, the fair defence
Before the diagnosis, let me give my own side of the table its due. We measure transformation by go-lives and migration milestones for reasons that are not stupid. Attributing revenue across a bundled base is genuinely hard. Boards run on three-year capital cycles that reward completion, not experimentation. A regulator and an auditor both have views, and neither rewards you for moving fast.

Given all of that, celebrating that the platform is live and stable is entirely rational. It is just not the same thing as growth, and we have quietly let ourselves pretend it is.

The one number that would have told me the truth
If I could add a single line to every transformation scorecard in the region, it would be revenue velocity: the rate at which an operator turns an idea into billed revenue. Not a slogan. A quantity you can measure. I would define it with three numbers any executive can pull this quarter.

Cadence
How many genuinely new commercial offers did you put in market last year? Not features. Billable offers a customer could buy.

Time to first dollar
The median number of days from offer concept to the first rupee, peso, or baht actually billed.

Fresh revenue share
The percentage of this year’s revenue that comes from anything you launched in the last 24 months.

Run those three on your own organisation before you finish reading. If your cadence is in single digits, your time to first dollar is measured in quarters, and your fresh-revenue share rounds to zero, then you do not have a growth problem you can capex your way out of. You have a velocity problem, and no network upgrade on the market will fix it.

The reason velocity beats the metrics we usually quote is simple. ARPU tells you what the business was worth last quarter. Velocity tells you whether it can grow at all. In a techco model the whole strategy is many small bets across content, fintech, enterprise, and partnerships. No single bet moves the needle. What moves it is the rate at which you can launch, and the discipline to kill the losers fast enough to fund the next attempt.

What velocity looks like when someone actually has it
The clearest example in the region is not subtle. Reliance Jio did not win India on network quality alone. It won by launching and scaling at a cadence its rivals could not match. Jio AirFiber is connecting more than a million homes a month, and over half its mobile traffic already runs on 5G that it monetised through relentless packaging and iteration rather than a premium tariff.

Now set that against the operators across the region that met the same flat market by pivoting from expansion to consolidation and cutting capex to defend free cash flow. Both responses are rational. Only one is growing. The difference is not the quality of the network underneath. It is the speed of the commercial machine sitting on top of it.

Why the industry’s proudest achievements will not save it
This is where I part company with the mood of my own industry. Walk the floor at DTW Ignite and the achievements are real: Eighteen operators serving two billion subscribers on common architecture, autonomous networks running live at Level 4, analysts pricing the autonomy prize at around 5% t of annual revenue.

But look hard at what almost all of it optimises. Cost. Efficiency. Operational autonomy. These are defensive gains. They protect the margin on the connectivity business we keep saying we want to escape.

We have spent a week congratulating ourselves on getting better at the very business we said was dying.

Composable architecture and autonomous operations are necessary. They are the plumbing that makes velocity possible. But they are not velocity, and no quantity of them will launch a single offer or price a single bundle. That work is commercial, and it is precisely where our investment and our attention are thinnest. We have poured a decade of capital into the layer that lowers our costs and starved the layer that grows our revenue, then acted surprised when revenue did not grow.

The change I would make on Monday
If I were briefing my leadership team tomorrow, I would do three things.

First, put revenue velocity on the transformation scorecard next to the go-live dates, and make one named person accountable for the number.

Second, give every new revenue line a real P&L and an explicit mandate to kill it fast if it does not move.

Third, stop asking the transformation programme what it modernised and start asking it how much faster we can now make money.

The operators that win the next decade in Asia Pacific will not be the ones with the most modern stack. Everyone gets the stack eventually. They will be the ones who turned an idea into revenue whilst the rest of us were still admiring the architecture.