Telefónica Germany

In the 2018 financial year, Telefónica Deutschland achieved its targets and essentially completed the integration of E-Plus. Excluding regulatory impact, revenue increased by 0.9 percent. This was primarily due to the strong end device business and the sustained strong demand for mobile tariffs with large data volumes. The operating result (OIBDA) continued to develop positively, in part thanks to the thorough realization of synergies. Adjusted for special and regulatory effects, it rose by 5.3 percent year-on-year to EUR 1.94 billion. The number of customers also showed a strong development. Telefónica Deutschland increased the number of mobile contract customer accesses by more than 1 million in 2018. In the fixed business, the company returned to growth thanks to strong demand for VDSL lines. For the current financial year, the company expects a steady development of its financial results. Before regulatory effects, revenue is expected to remain broadly stable. Adjusted for exceptional and regulatory effects, OIBDA should be broadly stable to slightly positive.

After the successful completion of the integration, CEO Markus Haas will lead Telefónica Deutschland through its digital transformation In today’s meeting, the Supervisory Board of Telefónica Deutschland resolved upon the further appointment of Markus Haas as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) until 31 December 2022 and agreed with him to extend his contract accordingly.

Telefónica Deutschland and Samsung Electronics have successfully piloted fixed wireless access (FWA) with 5G in Hamburg. The pilot of the 5G gigabit technology took place from December 2018 to February 2019 in the district of Hamm in Hamburg. A number of private households participated in the free pilot.

"The Telefónica Group has declared worldwide that it will only use artificial intelligence in accordance with explicitly formulated ethical principles", said Telefónica Deutschland CEO Markus Haas at the Telefónica BASECAMP in Berlin on 13 February 2019. Telefónica Deutschland has interpreted these principles for the local market. They are intended to give the company direction when it is working with data and artificial intelligence, thereby supporting the positive impact of technology on society.

Telefónica Deutschland is seeking legal clarity on the auction design for the upcoming 5G mobile communications standard with an urgent court application for the forthcoming auction procedure. This has no influence on the timetable for the network expansion of the technology.

Telefónica Deutschland massively expanded its LTE network in all German states in 2018. In total, the company expanded the O₂ network with more than 6,700 additional LTE stations throughout Germany. Telefónica Deutschland has thus enabled millions of people, even in rural areas, to use mobile high-speed Internet and modern digital applications and to make calls with top sound quality thanks to Voice over LTE (VoLTE).

Telefónica Deutschland is setting the stage for the company’s participation in the planned frequency auction for the next generation of mobile service (5G). As a first step, the complete documents were submitted to the Federal Network Agency (BNetzA) in a timely manner. Telefónica Deutschland sees major business opportunities in 5G, particularly in the context of Industry 4.0.

In 2019, the O₂ brand will continue its successful freedom campaign and start the new year with innovations for retail customers. A new highlight of the revised O₂ portfolio is the convergent O₂ my All in One XL tariff. From 5 February, customers will receive mobile, fixed and Internet services from a single provider at an outstanding value for money. For only EUR 59.99 a month, they can surf at high speed both on the move and at home.

Germans surf in the same way on the move as at home: Six out of ten consumers no longer distinguish whether they use the Internet while mobile or in their own home – they move without compromise in the digital world, anywhere, any time. That is the result of a representative study conducted by Telefónica Deutschland.

Nokia and Telefónica Germany have completed building their joint “Early 5G Innovation Cluster” in Berlin. The “Early 5G Innovation Cluster” incorporates five sites in Telefónica’s cellular network in Berlin-Friedrichshain. These sites, equipped with Nokia 5G Airscale radio and Wavence Microwave technology, will be used in the next months primarily to test and measure the performance and coverage of first 5G services in a dense urban area.

A clear rating improvement and a rise of an impressive 127 points in the 2018 connect network test serve as confirmation that Telefónica Deutschland has massively improved the quality of its O₂ network throughout Germany this year. This leap forward for the O₂ network would have been even more substantial without the more stringent measurement criteria applied this year. The company is the only German operator to have improved its result. Thanks to extensive quality improvements, the O₂ network significantly reduced the gap to the competitors in this year’s network test. It recently received a “good” rating in the network test by specialist magazine CHIP, which described the O₂ network as having made a “quantum leap”. The continued expansion of the network is already in full swing.

A clear “good” rating for the O₂ network, leaping up almost an entire point in comparison to the previous year (from 3.1 to 2.2): The results of the current, Germany-wide CHIP network test clearly show that Telefónica Deutschland has made huge improvements to network quality for its customers thanks to its extensive network measures. The specialist magazine CHIP even referred to it as a “quantum leap”. The O₂ network was also rated as good to very good in the sub-categories Internet, voice and LTE network as well as in multiple major cities. At the same time, Telefónica Deutschland announced more improvements to network quality in the year to come.

Telefónica Deutschland successfully moved ahead with the modernisation and expansion of its O₂ mobile network in 2018. The network integration of O₂ and E-Plus has made particularly good progress, with network quality improving in many areas. This has been confirmed by current measurements from network testing specialist P3 for major cities such as Cologne and Leipzig. Customers in increasing numbers of cities and regions can now benefit from a new and improved O₂ network thanks to the network integration, which is now in its final stages across all of Germany.

Telefónica Deutschland is having more than 1,500 mobile base stations connected to GasLINE’s high-performance network infrastructure in order to prepare it for the future technology 5G and for new digital applications. The two companies have already been cooperating successfully for several years on fibre-optic connections for mobile base stations and in the backbone field, and they have now signed a contract for another extensive expansion programme.

SZ-Interview with Markus Haas in the edition from 12.11.2018 CEO Markus Haas spoke with Süddeutsche Zeitung about the next 5G wireless communications generation, areas without coverage, and the lack of a European digitalisation policy. This post contains excerpts of that interview. The full text appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on 12 November 2018.[…]

Telefónica Deutschland is launching a partnership with vitroconnect GmbH. As a first step, Telefónica Deutschland will use the network-operator-independent platform of vitroconnect GmbH to gain access to EWE TEL GmbH’s access network. EWE TEL GmbH has a particularly strong presence in Lower Saxony, with high-performance broadband connections. With this partnership, Telefónica Deutschland is continuing to expand its position as a national fixed network provider in Germany and will be able to offer potential new customers fast VDSL connections of up to 100 Mbit/s in even more areas. It will also give many existing o2 DSL customers the option to switch to faster VDSL tariffs. The first customers have already been connected successfully.

We are currently having a lively debate, and rightly so, about the 5G frequency awards and the expansion of wireless networks in Germany. The demands for equal treatment of urban and rural areas are also legitimate. However, what matters is that we look very closely at needs, possibilities, and goals. Only if we carefully consider the frequency awards and infrastructure expansion, and provide a framework that promotes investment, can Germany be a global leader in 5G. Telefónica Deutschland is making a specific proposal for this.

Telefónica Deutschland continued the positive development of the first half of the year during the third quarter. Adjusted for special and regulatory effects, operating income before depreciation and amortisation (OIBDA) rose by 6 percent in the first nine months to EUR 1.42 billion. This was primarily due to synergies from the E-Plus merger and the continued positive development of the company’s mobile service revenue. Before regulatory effects, it increased by 0.5 percent year-on-year to EUR 3.97 billion. Overall, revenue remained stable. Mobile data consumption increased by half in the first nine months, mainly due to strong demand for O₂ Free tariffs with large data volumes and the acquisition of 233,000 additional contract customers in the third quarter. Because of the positive business development and due to the faster-than-expected realization of synergies from network consolidation, the company is narrowing its outlook for 2018 and now expects a slightly positive development of adjusted OIBDA. In line with its dividend promise, Telefónica Deutschland is also proposing to increase shareholder remuneration for the current fiscal year by one cent to EUR 0.27 per share.

Telefónica Deutschland is consistently continuing the comprehensive expansion of its LTE network. In the third quarter of 2018 alone, Telefónica Deutschland installed nearly 2,000 new LTE stations and upgraded existing locations with additional LTE capacities. In total, the O₂ network has already been expanded by around 5,000 LTE stations this year. By way of comparison, the area newly supplied with LTE is significantly larger than the federal state of Hesse. The company is thus fulfilling its announcement not only to further densify its LTE network in cities, but also to rapidly expand its LTE network in rural areas so that more and more customers can surf the O₂ network in more and more locations at faster speeds.

In the course of digitization, companies are generating great amounts of data. At the same time, the importance of data protection is rising as a result of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This raises the question of how companies can use Big Data in a legally compliant manner and in the interests of their customers. Telefónica NEXT sees the anonymization of data as an opportunity for the data economy. Therefore, the corporate start-up developed a TÜV-certified anonymization process. Analyses from anonymized mobile network data currently support traffic planning in Germany among others. Telefónica NEXT now also offers this procedure to other companies for their data, for example from the banking or insurance sector.