“In fact, 46% of CEOs in the telecommunications industry think their company won’t survive the next decade. » On February 27, 2023, alone on the stage of the opening conference of the world congress of mobile telephony, the show which brings together each year in Barcelona (Spain) the world telecoms industry, Christel Heydemann, the general manager of Orange , chills the audience. In the rows of the amphitheater, everyone casts a worried eye at their neighbour: which of the two might no longer have the opportunity to visit the Catalan salon in ten years?
Extract of the annual study of the consulting firm PwC on the morale of the bosses published in January on the occasion of the forum of Davos (Switzerland), this number-shock alarms on the state of health of the telecoms sector, confronted, according to Mme Heydemann, to “headwinds” (…) perhaps never so important”. The competition? ” Fierce “, she judges. Regulations ? “Sometimes obsolete. » Investments ? “Massive. Nearly 600 billion euros in Europe over the last decade! », more “difficult to make profitable”. Data traffic? “Exponentially growing and mostly concentrated among a handful of digital players. » All with “consumers who expect to pay less and get more”.
“I really wonder if this is what we had in mind ten years ago for the future of our European industry”, concluded in Barcelona the CEO of Orange. In office since April 2022, after eight years at Schneider Electric, Mme Heydemann knows well that an industrialist can disappear, no matter how big: in the early 2010s, she experienced from the inside the fall of Alcatel-Lucent, former world leader in telecoms, today diluted in the Finnish Nokia.
The spleen of the “telcos”
Operators drag their spleen for a long time. European “telcos” have been concerned for years about the weak growth in their turnover: 2% on average per year for the sector between 2015 and 2020, according to the Digiworld Institute (formerly Idate), a think tank which brings together digital operators and groups.
Hence their breakthrough in new markets, such as Africa for Orange, South America for Telefonica and the United States for Deutsche Telekom, in order to replace the reserves of subscribers that they have exhausted in Europe. Hence also their costly attempts to diversify into other professions, such as the media, often resulting in failures, sometimes bitter. The recent sale of OCS by Orange to Canal+ also marks the end of the illusory convergence between tips and content, developed in the early 2000s by Jean-Marie Messier at Vivendi Universal.
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