The hottest ticket at Mobile World Congress 2014 was without doubt Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's session.

Orange has begun a strategic review of its assets in Uganda and Kenya, although it has not confirmed that it is looking to sell either unit.

Now that the dust has settled after Mobile World Congress, I’ve had time to collect my thoughts following on from some of the conversations I had at the show.

Total mobile service revenue in the Central & Eastern Europe region grew 0.6 % year-on-year in the first half of 2013, reaching EUR22.5 billion, according to Analysys Mason.

The Indian market leading operator Bharti Airtel has confirmed that it will buy smaller local operator Loop Mobile.

Nokia has stated that the sale of its Devices & Services unit to Microsoft will not be affected by its continuing legal dispute with the Indian tax authorities.

Telenor CEO Jon Fredrik Baksaas believes that the operator will break even on its Myanmar business within three years.

Reliance Jio Infocomm has bagged spectrum in 14 of India’s 22 telecom circles following the country’s auctions, which will allow it to compete with market leaders Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular and Vodafone India.

Well, the experts have spoken – and whichever way you slice it, 2014 is set to be an eventful year in the telecoms industry.

The two major events in the telecoms market this year are likely to be the creation of a Long Term Evolution (LTE) network and further development of Tele2 in Russia.

In the largest market, South Africa, we have seen several trends.

Before investing in emerging markets, MTN considers a combination of factors including mobile penetration levels, population size, the economic growth of a country and the competitive landscape.

2014 will be the year that operators trade gut and intuition for a new way of marketing – one that relies on big data analytics and science. 

While we’re no doubt well into the global data boom, the number of sources generating this fast-growing volume of data continues to multiply exponentially.

We expect to see significant growth in OTN (optical transport network) technology across all regions of the developing world, mainly because of the reliance on mobile infrastructure vs. traditional telecommunications services.

In 2014, eCommerce will finally have an impact on the buying and selling of international communications services.

In emerging markets, investments in LTE networks will continue.

The world is more connected now than ever before. As more devices are connected on the internet, there is a distinct need for innovative and flexible data solutions.

In some African nations, three times as many people have access to a mobile phone than to clean water. A shocking statistic but it shows how important mobile communications are.

Operators are already spending billions on beefing up capacity to handle the tremendous increase in video and data traffic, but Google and Facebook are walking away with all the revenue.