Global scale
The Group wants to better harness global economies of scale with more than 261 million mobile customers and further fixed-network and TV customers worldwide, using globally available services and API-based IT platforms in the cloud. These economies of scale are to be leveraged with the help of global ICT solutions and partnerships.
A global orientation also means systematically driving forward knowledge-sharing within the Group. We additionally intend to focus on scaling internal business models and platforms across the entire Group, including, e.g., our customer app in Europe and Germany, and our OneTV approach with a unified TV production platform for our national companies in Europe. Further examples include our six B2B competence centers, which join forces as needed to develop platforms/services and deliver them to all markets and customer segments. A further lever is the implementation of a common operating model for parts of our network infrastructure in Europe (Common Operating Model for Europe).
In addition to that, we are adapting our production platforms to meet the customer needs of the future, by building cloud-based, scalable, modular platforms and opening up access to selected parts of these platforms to third parties (e.g., service providers and app developers) via standardized application programming interfaces (APIs). Our goal is to make connectivity, services, and data (e.g., location data, connection conditions, and user behavior) combinable with new applications as needed. The benefits of this architecture include shorter development cycles, faster exploitation of revenue potential, more automated and significantly more cost-efficient production, scaling across business units and borders, and a substantially better customer experience by virtue of personalized digital interactions.
A further component of our global orientation is securing our majority stake in T‑Mobile US over the long term. We passed the threshold to a majority stake in T‑Mobile US back in the first half of 2023. In June 2024, we exercised fixed-price options to acquire around 7 million additional T‑Mobile US shares. Taking the treasury shares held by T‑Mobile US into account, our ownership stake in T‑Mobile US was 51.4 % as of December 31, 2024.