The executives, which included CEOs from some of the top telcos across the continent, were eager to warn the audience that Europe risks falling further behind unless the industry can accelerate consolidation and streamline regulatory frameworks.
Speaking at FT Live this morning, CEOs from Orange, Telefónica and Nokia, alongside former Italian digital minister Vittorio Colao, painted a picture of an industry grappling with the reality of fragmented markets and an urgent need for greater strategic alignment.
“There has been uneven implementation in the digital area,” said Vittorio Colao, former minister for technological innovation and digital transformation in Italy, and current vice chairman EMEA at General Atlantic. “It’s very important to start having a single legislation across Europe, but the problem is speed of implementation. The big thing will be to shorten technology adoption time and for everything to be more focused.”
Europe is still faced with a range of digital challenges across the telco and technology space, including the digital innovation gap. However, efforts to scale across the continent are currently being challenged by rising competition across the rest of the world and a lack of cohesion in national strategies. This is making regulation more complex, the CEOs said.
Justin Hotard, CEO at Nokia, explained: “Technology is getting lost in regulation and policy. We need less regulation – look at GDPR, this was a very good regulation and a great example of waiting for the right regulation before actually launching.
“It’s a question of: how do we get access to scale and capital? How do we support large market access? We leverage the market we have here, reduce regulation and then level that regulation until we understand what the technology is doing and then regulate responsibly.”
Christel Heydemann, CEO at Orange Group, noted: “Trump is creating a sense of urgency within the industry, but as CEOs our job hasn’t really changed. Policy takes time and investors want to see return on their investment and the belief is investing in telecom services doesn’t create return and has a complex regulatory landscape – but we are all saying: look, these are the right things to do. The question is, how do we implement it?”
All panellists emphasised the importance of reforming merger guidelines, highlighting consolidation as necessary to compete globally.
Marc Murtra, chairman and CEO at Telefónica, said: “With consolidation, we have to be flexible. There is a lot of efficiencies to be made, and we need to simplify our focus. The margins are tiny, or balances are fragile and, if regulation is uncertain, for example, with regards to spectrum, it’s much harder to invest seven years down the line.”
At Orange, Heydemann draws on the company’s experience of not waiting until merger guideline revision to complete its Spanish acquisition and noted that, 18 months after closing, prices have actually continued to decrease for customers.
“I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding that our markets have changed,” she said. “We are in a very mature market, where actually the market, because of demography, is slowly but surely in decline. And do we need scale to be able to be competitive? Absolutely, yes. So we’re talking about merger guidelines to help create scale in our own markets that helps us continue to invest for security.”
Colao added: “We need to shorten the adoption time for everything and be much less tolerant of duplication of laws and go for a single homogeneous system across Europe.”
He explained: “To enable investment and innovation we need simplified regulations … It is important to invest in data centres and compute power – but let’s not forget about Applied AI, this is where the next game is going to be.”
In the current geopolitical landscape, the panellists made a case for network security and a need for companies needing to ‘play by the same rules’ when it comes to securing networks across Europe’s digital economy.
“It’s not just about size and scale – you can protect sovereignty and still allow consolidation,” Hotard noted.
“The reality is that mobile networks are critical infrastructure. If you look at what happened in Ukraine, what was the first thing that the Russians did before they invaded? They attempted to take down the networks.
“Networks are a critical as power infrastructure and even more critical for economic continuity in the short term. We need to recognise that they need to be protected.”
The message of the panel was clear: without rapid regulatory reform and market consolidation, Europe risks becoming increasingly dependent on non-European technology infrastructure, undermining both competitiveness and sovereignty in an increasingly digital world.
The key, the executives said, is in clear investment priorities.
Colao said: “We need to get to a single European market. At the end of the day, if we cannot get cooperation because some member states oppose it, fine, go alone. Create a coalition of the willing and start.
“The importance is to get access to large markets. I do believe that it’s important to invest in data centres and computing and supercomputing power, but let’s not forget vertical AI – you have the customers, you have the trust, so work together to create vertical AI to defend the European industrial sectors.”
Heydemann added: “We cannot rely on hyperscalers’ cloud in the core of our networks. So we are investing in open-source telco cloud technology for networks. We don’t want to replace public cloud because the race is over, but for sovereign, private, hybrid type of environments, for critical use cases, absolutely we will.
“LLM is not the challenge. The challenge is the data and the applied AI use cases and that’s where Europe cannot miss the battle.”
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