Gathered in Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress from Monday to Thursday 6 March, several chairmen and CEOs of major telecom companies reiterated their position in favour of consolidating the sector in order to boost its competitiveness and ensure European sovereignty.
Marc Murtra, CEO of Spanish company Telefónica, Margherita Della Valle, CEO of Vodafone, and Timotheus Höttges, CEO of Deutsche Telekom, took part in a round-table discussion where they called for greater freedom for large companies to consolidate.
According to Marc Murtra, if the European authorities did not allow this, “Europe’s position in the world will continue to dwindle and [we] will not have the capacity to decide our future autonomously”.
Timotheus Höttges, for his part, said that he had counted the number of regulators, “including supervisory bodies”, his company deals with in Europe and that the number came to “around 270”.
In particular, he called for a drastic reduction in European bureaucracy, taking DOGE, America’s new Department of Government Efficiency, as an example.
The European Commission’s Deputy Director General for Communications Networks Renate Nikolay said that the “challenging geopolitical context” meant that “it’s crucial for Europe to ensure our tech sovereignty and our strategic autonomy in critical sectors”.
Making the link between AI and telecommunications. Arthur Mensch, founder of French start-up Mistral AI, suggested that European telecom operators had the opportunity to invest heavily in data centres and become ‘hyperscalers’ (providers of infrastructure and development capacity for cloud-based AI services) for AI, with the aim of capitalising on existing fibre-optic networks to build AI-ready facilities.
Proposed by the European Commission in February 2024, reforming European telecommunications would involve opening up the sector more widely to the creation of pan-European companies (see EUROPE 13355/8).
Faced with these ambitions, which Mario Draghi echoed in his report, the Member States are showing a great deal of caution and timidity (see EUROPE 13540/4), expressing concern about their “impact on the competition of national markets and operators, who are not in a position to act on a pan-European scale”. (Original version in French by Isalia Stieffatre)