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América Móvil, S.A.B. de C.V.
América Móvil sells phone, internet, TV, and broadband service to consumers and businesses across Latin America and Europe.
América Móvil is the phone company for much of Latin America. It sells wireless service, home internet, fixed-line phone service, and pay TV to ordinary people and to businesses. If you live in Mexico City, São Paulo, or Bogotá, there's a good chance your mobile signal, your home Wi-Fi, or your TV package comes from this company.
The business runs on a simple idea: own the pipes. Building a wireless network or stringing fiber into homes costs a fortune up front, but once it's there, each additional customer is cheap to serve. That's why telecom is a scale game — the biggest player in a country tends to earn the fattest margins, and América Móvil is usually that player. Its flagship brand in Mexico is Telcel, which dominates the country's mobile market, and its Claro brand is a household name across Brazil, Colombia, and much of the rest of the region. The company got its start by being spun off from Mexico's national phone monopoly in 1990, and under Carlos Slim it grew into one of the world's largest telecom empires. Regulators have repeatedly tried to clip its wings at home — Mexico's telecom watchdog hit it with tough rules a decade ago after declaring it dominant in the market, which slowed its growth in its biggest country and pushed it to look harder abroad.
Europe is now a big part of the story. América Móvil bought Austria's Telekom Austria, which gives it operations across Central and Eastern Europe, and it has been rolling out fast fiber and 5G networks. The cash engine is wireless: monthly phone bills from hundreds of millions of subscribers, paid reliably, fund the network builds. The risk is the same as ever — competition from rivals like Telefónica and aggressive new entrants, plus currencies in Latin America that can swing wildly against the dollar and shrink the value of profits earned abroad.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026