Telefonica Digital is the company’s digital business focused division that was founded just nine months ago. It is focused on the development of new business revenue streams for the company, including financial services, M2M, eHealth, advertising, video & media, security and cloud computing.

This is expected to grow by 20% year on year, as well as delivering flow on benefits to other aspects of the core Telefonica business. It was worth €2.4bn in 2011 to the company.
Telefonica has been having troubles related to Spain’s wider economic troubles, and is rumoured to be looking at divesting some its global assets, including its extensive holdings in South America.

The company has announced that it has developed billing arrangements with major technology companies, such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and RIM to allow Direct to Bill payments for purchased goods in those product eco-systems – this is especially important in South America where credit card ownership is low and some 60% of the population do not possess bank accounts – yet have mobile phones.

"Few organisations can claim to have a direct billing relationship with hundreds of millions of customers globally," said Matthew Key, Chairman & CEO of Telefónica Digital.

"The creation of Telefónica Digital has allowed us to better harness the power of this capability and use it to help drive the mobile monetisation strategies of some of the world’s largest technology companies. We believe that direct to bill will become an increasingly significant part of the overall mobile commerce market."

Direct to Bill is already operational in Germany with 400,000 customers and will be rolled out to 14 countries by the end of 2012.

The company also developed a partnership with the Middle East/Asia telco Etisalat, extending its reach across 17 more countries and 170 million customers. It is also looking to expand its advertising footprint in Brazil, where it has a significant stake in Vivo, Brazil’s largest mobile telco.

The company also recently announced its support for the opensource Mozilla smartphone OS, Firefox OS.