• BT to sell its Italian business
• Ericsson pumps €200m into its SMO R&D 
• Africa and Middle East prop up Orange’s Q1

In today’s industry news roundup: In keeping with its domestic focus, BT is in the process of offloading its Italian unit, BT Italia; Ericsson is investing €200m into the development of its service management and orchestration (SMO) automation platform that it calls the EIAP (Ericsson Intelligent Automation Platform); exceptional sales growth in its Africa and Middle East operations helped Orange to achieve a small uptick in Q1 sales and earnings; and much more!

BT Group has entered into a preliminary agreement to sell its Italian business to Retelit, a provider of communications and IT services to the Italian enterprise sector. The companies have not unveiled an agreed price, but Retelit noted in this announcement that BT Italia generated revenues of about €160m in 2024 from more than 360 customers. For Retelit, the acquisition, which still requires regulatory approvals, “will significantly enhance [its] fibre optic network by an additional 11,500km, resulting in a total network span exceeding 47,000km. It will also expand Retelit’s national datacentre infrastructure by an additional 10MW of power capacity. This expansion will further strengthen Retelit’s coverage of the Italian corporate market, providing a more comprehensive suite of ICT infrastructure and services to support the innovation and the digital transformation of Italian enterprises.” Retelit is clearly aiming to achieve significant scale in the Italian business-to-business (B2B) market, as it also recently partnered with the Italian government’s Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) for the recent €700m acquisition of Sparkle, the international network and services arm of Telecom Italia (TIM). One of the other main players in Italy’s B2B telecom services sector is Fastweb + Vodafone, which was created earlier this year when Swisscom completed the acquisition of Vodafone Italy (which is particularly strong in the enterprise services sector) and merged it with its existing Italian fixed line operator, Fastweb. BT, meanwhile, is on a mission to focus its ongoing efforts on its domestic market in the UK and is pulling back from its international operations as per the current strategy of CEO Allison Kirkby, who has made it clear on a number of occasions that BT is seeking partners for its Global unit, which is now run (again) by Bas Burger. 

Only days after announcing new production facilities in India, Ericsson is once again spreading its international bets with a €200m investment over three years in its facilities in Athlone, Ireland, a move “supported” by the country’s government. The investments will go towards the further development of the Ericsson Intelligent Automation Platform (EIAP), the vendor’s service management and orchestration (SMO) solution that enables the automated management of Open RAN networks and integration of multiple third-party rApps. Ericsson is pushing hard to get its EIAP deployed by as many operators as possible and become the leading provider of AI-enabled mobile network automation to the telco community and it has some big name users already in the form of AT&T, Swisscom, Vodafone and Telstra. 

Orange’s Africa & Middle East (AME) division once again came to the rescue as the giant French telco reported a 0.6% year-on-year increase in first-quarter revenues to €9.9bn. While its French operations suffered a slight dip in sales, down by 1.3% to €4.3bn (in what it describes as “a competitive environment”) and Orange Business continued to be dragged down by legacy products (with its revenues down by 4.9% to €1.85bn), Orange’s rest of Europe operations reported flat sales at €1.75bn during the quarter and the MEA division ramped up its revenues by 12.8% to almost €2.05bn. Group earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) (after leases) was up by 3.2% to €2.8bn. CEO Christel Heydemann stated: “The Africa & Middle East region experienced exceptional double-digit revenue growth for the eighth consecutive quarter. All growth engines are performing well, in particular our data offers, which represent 60% of growth this quarter. This momentum is driven by our 4G and 5G networks, used by more than 80 million customers, as well as the deployment of digital services, such as our ‘Max it’ super app, which now has close to 20 million users.” 

NTT Data, the international digital services giant that is majority owned by Japanese telco NTT Group, has forged a partnership with ChatGPT developer OpenAI to jointly develop AI tools for enterprises focused on enhanced data security and to develop AI agents for enterprise users, according to Nikkei Asia.   

– The staff, TelecomTV