James Pearce, TelecomTV (00:08):
I'm at Mobile World Congress. My name's James Pearce and I'm with TelecomTV, and I'm joined today by Erik Brenneis, who's the CEO of Vodafone IoT. Thanks for joining us today, Erik. Very nice to meet you. Yes. So let's dive straight in. Why don't you talk us through some of the latest developments with Vodafone IoT?

Erik Brenneis, Vodafone IoT (00:26):
So we're seeing significant momentum in the market for us. Our revenues are growing strongly. We are focusing on investing in our platforms and services to serve our customers even better around the world. And we're also investing a lot in geographical expansion because the world is becoming more complex every day and being able to deliver into every country in the world where our customers are requires considerable investment and that's what we've done. On top of this, last year, Vodafone IoT became a standalone company within Vodafone, which increased focus as well.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (01:05):
And we were talking before about the number of connections. I'm sure you can give us an idea of that. But when it comes to IoT adoption, talk me through the sectors that you identify as having the best growth opportunities and the ones that are leading the way at the moment.

Erik Brenneis, Vodafone IoT (01:18):
Historically, automotive and energy have been the biggest sectors with all the new cars being connected today. And with electricity meters, they started to be connected. Now we see significant growth in connected gas, water, heat meters, and the whole industrial segment, such as connected production machines or construction machines, that's growing considerably as well. And the biggest growth segment is actually the medical field. More and more patients are getting connected, meaning that they don't have to be in the hospital anymore. They can be monitored at home. There are connected sleep apnoea devices, connected heart pacemakers, and there are also connected dialysis machines and many more. So we see significant growth across all segments.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (02:10):
That makes such a difference. Really, really interesting. Now let's go on to one of your most recent announcements. You announced a partnership with Skylo for NTN, NB-IoT connectivity. What was the thinking behind the deal?

Erik Brenneis, Vodafone IoT (02:22):
Yes. Our partnership with Skylo means that we will be able to offer our customers seamless connectivity with coverage everywhere in the world, wherever they are, even on high seas or in the desert or on the highest mountains. Because mobile network is not available everywhere, but there are applications such as container tracking or trucks travelling through the desert that need connectivity all the time. And the new technologies mean that for our customers, the satellite network looks just like any other mobile network. We manage this complexity. It doesn't require specific hardware. It uses the standard hardware, and that's going to be a significant change for our customers, connectivity everywhere. And we're bringing that to the market with Skylo, and also with Iridium, another satellite provider, this year and in 2026.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (03:20):
I mean, you mentioned complexity, and one of the things about the global IoT market is it is very complex. There's a huge range of devices, many of which need to be able to cross borders as well. How do you manage that complexity and prevent fragmentation?

Erik Brenneis, Vodafone IoT (03:36):
Yes. I think that is actually why we are there because we have a specialised team. It's a global team that we have, not limited to the Vodafone geographic footprint. And we ensure that we have the right agreements with all partners around the world so that we can access all the networks seamlessly. We also have technical solutions in place to deal with countries which have difficult regulatory requirements, such as, for example, having a local SIM in the country and countries like Brazil, United Arab Emirates or Turkey. And we have a global team working with our customers wherever they are. And this team is both sales team and especially technical teams so that our team helps the customers create their technical solutions.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (04:28):
Maybe we can talk a little bit about AI because that's everywhere. So what role is AI playing in Vodafone IoT's strategy?

Erik Brenneis, Vodafone IoT (04:35):
AI plays a significant role. So first of all, AI is one of the big drivers for our market growth because the data volumes that our customers use have actually in a positive sense increased greatly. They are much more than over the last years. Why? Because customers upload more and more data because their AI systems use this data and find new business models or find improvements for their products in this data. So AI, big driver for our market. Then we have started to use AI in our customer service to make processes quicker, to also provide the answers for simple questions directly to our customers. And we've been able to actually put more real experts into our support teams because AI actually handles the first contact with the customer. Then we started to use, or actually we're using at scale AI in our software development. So the time to develop software compared to two years ago, now already is 2.5 times faster, meaning we can implement more and more requirements for our customers quickly.

(05:49):
And finally, we have rolled out AI to all our employees globally so that they use AI in order to be more productive in their daily work, whether it's on the sales side or on the administrative side. And we've also seen significant productivity increases. So it's all over our business and especially the driver for our market growth.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (06:13):
So maybe you can tell us a little bit about what's next for Vodafone at your team. What's on the roadmap?

Erik Brenneis, Vodafone IoT (06:19):
From Vodafone IoT's point of view, we talked about satellite. That's a big thing. We talked about AI, basically embedding ourselves into all the AI systems and feeding the data into AI is the big thing. I always make the comparison. If you're a human being, you have your sensors, your eyes, your hands, and you have your brain. The brain is the AI, but you need to get the data from your eyes, from your hands to your brain, and that's what we do. So we are the nervous system as IoT connectivity provider, and that will just get bigger and bigger. That's the second big trend. The third big trend is, everybody knows the world is a difficult place at the moment politically. So this fragmentation of the world means that you need to make more and more investments in order to really be able to serve your customers in every country of the world.

(07:13):
We've done that and we continue to do this. And finally, we are also continuously looking to expand into other parts of the world in order to serve our customers wherever we are. We've been very successful with new, as an example, with new electric vehicle manufacturers in Asia who bring cars to Europe, and we develop these technical solutions together with them in Asia, and they are then exported to Africa, to Europe, and to other places. So these are the big trends that are upcoming.

James Pearce, TelecomTV (07:47):
Well, that's all for today. So thank you so much for joining me on TelecomTV.

Erik Brenneis, Vodafone IoT (07:51):
Thank you very much. It's always a pleasure.