• Vodafone offers hope for German turnaround
• NaaS specialist banks $19m as it beds down in Saudi
• Nvidia and Mistral AI join major Paris AI datacentre project

In today’s industry news roundup: Vodafone says its business in Germany is set to grow its revenues this year after a challenging 12 months; network-a-service firm Graphiant lands funding from, and engagement with, Saudi investors, including STC; a massive AI campus is being built in Paris with Nvidia and GenAI giant Mistral AI involved; and much more!

Vodafone Group is expecting its business in Germany, its single largest country unit, to return to growth in the current financial year (ending March 2026) after a challenging 12 months that saw the German operation lose customers and report much lower revenues. Overall, Vodafone Group reported a 2% year-on-year increase in revenues for the full financial year, which ended 31 March 2025, to €37.45bn, with service revenues up by 2.8% to €30.76bn. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) dipped slightly, by 0.8%, to €10.93bn. “Since I set out my plans to transform Vodafone two years ago, Vodafone has changed,” stated group CEO Margherita Della Valle. “We have reshaped Europe, we are seeing the positive impact of our drive for customer satisfaction in all our markets – most noticeably in the UK and Germany – and we have delivered strong operational improvements across the business,” she noted, referencing the sales of Vodafone’s businesses in Spain and Italy during the financial year and the agreement to merge its UK operation with Three. “Clearly there is much more to do, but this period of transition has repositioned Vodafone for multi-year growth. Looking ahead, we expect to see broad-based momentum across Europe and Africa, and for Germany to return to top-line growth during this year. This is reflected in our guidance for profit and cash flow growth for the year ahead,” stated the CEO. Della Valle’s management team and the telco’s investors will be glad that the business in Germany is not going to shrink any further, as its revenues dipped by 6% to €12.18bn (representing 35% of the company’s total group sales). That slump was due to the loss of pay-TV customers following regulatory changes but also the loss of fixed broadband customers – TelecomTV reported on Vodafone’s challenges in Germany earlier this year. The suggestion that things are going to get better helped Vodafone’s share price gain more than 3% to 74.7 pence on the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday. However, Vodafone’s full year numbers were blighted by a revaluation of the business in Germany, as the telco reported a €4.35bn impairment charge against Vodafone Germany because of the low margins of the past year and the lower medium-term outlook for earnings growth from that particular part of its business, even though revenues are expected to rise. As a result of that impairment charge, plus a €165m charge against the value of Vodafone’s business in Romania, Vodafone Group reported an operating loss for the full fiscal year of €411m compared with an operating profit of €3.67bn in the previous year. Beyond Germany, Vodafone’s other operations performed generally well and, as is often the case, the operator received a very welcome boost from its operations in Africa, where revenues increased by 5% to €7.79bn – for more on how that region is helping the financial performance of a number of major telcos, see Africa still offers telco growth potential.

Network-as-a-service (NaaS) specialist Graphiant is the latest company to benefit from the boom in AI-related networking and infrastructure investments in Saudi Arabia, though on a somewhat smaller scale. Following the news that Humain is to build major new AI datacentre facilities in Saudi Arabia and source billions of dollars worth of tech from major US chip vendors, Graphiant has secured $19m in an extension of its Series B funding round, with the new cash injections coming from Tali Ventures, which is part of Saudi telco STC Group, and Wa’ed Ventures, the investment arm of oil giant Aramco. “The investment is more than capital; it signals that the Kingdom is accelerating its transformation into a regional nexus for cloud, connectivity and AI,” suggested Graphiant, which has set up its regional headquarters in Riyadh, in this blog. “With its regional headquarters opening in Riyadh, Graphiant will work with STC Group on localisation, skills development and new infrastructure initiatives. Expect joint solutions tuned for sectors central to the Kingdom’s economic roadmap: Energy, smart manufacturing, fintech and e-government.”

AI chip giant Nvidia, French generative AI (GenAI) developer Mistral AI, French national investment bank Bpifrance and MGX, the UAE investment fund focused on AI and advanced technology, have formed a joint venture to establish “Europe’s largest AI Campus, which will be located in the Paris region and is expected to ultimately reach a capacity of 1.4 GW,” MGX has announced. “Located in Europe’s leading economic zone, the AI Campus marks a major step toward establishing sovereign, sustainable, and globally competitive AI infrastructure across the continent,” it added, noting that the move “builds on broader AI cooperation agreements supported by UAE President His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and French President Emmanuel Macron at the AI Action Summit in February 2025.” The campus will be “Europe’s first purpose-built intelligence hub supporting the full AI lifecycle, from model training and inference to deployment of generative and applied AI systems,” and will “feature advanced compute infrastructure, facilities for experimentation, and real-world development environments. The open platform will include exascale-class computing, sovereign cloud integration, and low-carbon hyperscale datacentres optimised for AI. It will support large-scale AI adoption in fields such as healthcare, mobility, energy, finance and manufacturing, while advancing Europe’s digital and climate sovereignty,” added MGX, which is also one of the companies involved in the massive Stargate Project in the US. The construction of the campus is expected to begin in the second half of 2026 and be ready for operation by 2028. The new venture was announced during the Choose France Summit held in Versailles. 

Research firm Dell’Oro Group reports that the value of the mobile core network (MCN) market “skyrocketed” in the first quarter of this year, with the year-on-year growth rate hitting 32% (though no fiscal values were shared in this press release).   The China market “led the way with a 122% year-on-year growth, and the worldwide market, excluding China, was up 12% year on year,” it noted. “With this high growth rate in Q1 2025, we are raising our projection for the year 2025 from 2% year on year to 5% year on year,” stated Dave Bolan, research director at Dell’Oro Group. “In China, several major projects were completed in Q1 2025, mostly beneficial to ZTE. Other factors driving growth was swapping out virtual network functions (VNFs) with cloud-native network functions (CNFs) and migration of subscribers from 4G handsets to 5G handsets, thus increasing demand for more capacity on the newly minted 5G standalone (5G SA) networks. We have noted one major 5G SA network launching in 2025, Orange in France. Airtel in India and Vodafone in Spain have announced plans to ready their networks for 5G SA in 2025. We expect the 2025 growth rate for the 5G MCN market to be 15% year on year. In addition, IMS core is beginning to show continued growth as more 3G networks sunset and, with modernisation to CNFs on the rise, we project IMS core will be up 5% year on year,” added Bolan. According to Dell’Oro, the leading MCN vendors are Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson and Nokia.

– The staff, TelecomTV