Success as world’s sixth most valuable operator driven by tech strategy as well as T-Mobile US merger
Deutsche Telekom group’s market capitalisation exceeded €100 billion on Wednesday, passing the €20 share price threshold and meeting CEO Timotheus Höttges’ stated expectations. It is the first time the share price has passed that threshold since 2001*.
The next nearest European telco group is Vodafone with a market cap of €27.5 billion. DT is now the sixth largest telecom company in the world based on equity value, behind its own subsidiary T-Mobile US, Verizon, Comcast, China Mobile and AT&T, according to companiesmarketcap.com.
Long-term strategy
DT has risen steadily since the pandemic and certainly its fortunes have been boosted massively by merging its US subsidiary T-Mobile with rival Sprint on 1 April 2020.
However, DT’s success is not solely about its US investment. For example, today it announced the migration of 10 million voice subscribers to its cloud platform, which handles billions minutes interoperating with about 100 interconnect partners. This is a major milestone in its Next-generation IP Multimedia Subsystem (NIMS) strategy.
Abdu Mudesir, CTO of Telekom Deutschland [its German brand] said, “With the launch of our NIMS platform, we have implemented a game-changing level of lifecycle automation for all telco cloud and payload components. This enables Deutsche Telekom to validate and deploy new software for our customers in a few days, or soon even minutes, instead of weeks – thanks to our great team and ambitious partners.”
Automation is the key
End-to-end automation is the fundamental to the success of NIMS, DT’s Thomas van Briel, SVP, Architecture & Strategy, explains in an interview here. It is built around a detailed framework of automated workflows across every function of the network, so DT can create, test and launch new services quickly for millions of users.
As Caroline Chappell, Research Director, Cloud & Platform Services, at Analysys Mason told MarketScreener, “The level of automation in the NIMS architecture is exceptionally high and forward-looking. Deutsche Telekom has set a new standard for the industry with its bold, vendor-agnostic approach.”
Telekom Deutschland states it has “created an innovative and highly-collaborative multi-vendor ecosystem to deliver on the vision of this highly-automated, cloud-based architecture”. Partners include Juniper Networks for cloud infrastructure and as the prime integrator, plus Mavenir, Metaswitch (part of Microsoft), Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo and Red Hat.
Telekom added, “Due to the high level of disaggregation and the horizontal cloud approach, more technology partners can easily be added as the demand for services grows”.
*lts all-time high share price was briefly €102.90 in March 2000 during the lunacy of the dotcom boom.