Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Hottges speaks all over Cellular International Congress, the sector’s greatest cell honest, in Barcelona on March 3, 2025.
Lluis Gene | Afp | Getty Photographs
BARCELONA — Europe wishes its personal model of Elon Musk’s so-called Section of Executive Potency, Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges mentioned Monday as he made an impassioned plea for the pocket to short crimson tape at the telecommunications trade.
Europe is falling at the back of friends such because the U.S. and China relating to key technological inventions akin to synthetic wisdom and next-generation 5G networks, Höttges mentioned all over a panel match on the Cellular International Congress match in Barcelona.
“What Europe needs is a DOGE,” Höttges instructed the target market, talking along Vodafone’s Margherita Della Valle, Orange’s Christel Heydemann and Telefonica’s Marc Murtra.
“We need an initiative to cut down this bureaucracy and this administration here, because there are tens of thousands of people sitting there and administrating our industries,” he added.
The Trump management simplest introduced plans to starting DOGE closing age. The initiative, which is led via billionaire Tesla boss Elon Musk, used to be tasked with slashing federal executive management prices.
DOGE isn’t in fact a central authority company — and its chief Musk isn’t an elected professional. Since its status quo, DOGE has appeared to slash spending at federal executive companies, making abundance activity cuts at segments for protection, schooling and effort.
Höttges mentioned that he’s counted the entire regulators Deutsche Telekom trade in with — together with watchdogs for media, cybersecurity and privateness — and that total quantity got here to round 270.
He added that, not like alternative Eu telcos, Deutsche Telekom is in a position to supply maximum of its revenues from the U.S. by way of its majority stake in American wi-fi community T-Cellular.
Renewed yell for consolidation
As telecom companies have regularly accomplished in earlier iterations of MWC, Höttges made a renewed name for Europe to short indisposed on boundaries to marketplace consolidation within the trade.
“There is no reason that every market has to operate with three or four operators,” he mentioned. “We should build a European single market.”
Nonetheless, analysts don’t see trade consolidation as a “silver bullet” for the sphere. PwC’s International Telecommunications Manage Florian Gröne mentioned that presen EU law has resulted in “fragmentation” within the pocket he’s now not sure that he concurs with “industry mantra that you need cross border consolidation and everything’s going to be fine.”
“A vertically integrated telco model has its purpose, but it’s not the right lens to drive outcomes both from an enterprise perspective and a regulatory, more societal perspective,” Gröne instructed CNBC on a decision closing hour forward of MWC.
Höttges added that Europe must significantly believe charging U.S. tech giants akin to Amazon, Microsoft and Netflix a price for utilization of cell carriers’ networks, an initiative that has been proposed a couple of instances within the future.
“It’s a free service we are offering, because there are no interconnections whatsoever. And I think even they should contribute a little bit to lead to the investment needs of our industry is well,” Höttges mentioned.
