How focus on connectivity and customers forged change

When Alison and I arrived in early 2020, Telia had just acquired advertising-funded TV channels and expensive Champions League rights, and had no capex for 5G. The telco business in our key markets had not grown for years. We were complex, slow and burdened with legacy technology that made the customer experience cumbersome and inefficient. What we still had was perceived network leadership as a brand strength, and a direct relationship with more than half the households and up to sixty percent of the enterprises across our core markets. So going back to the core was obvious, and it was the first priority.

The networks came first, and we had to modernise an ageing 4G estate and build 5G at the same time. We applied simplification, standardisation and scaling literally. Simplification meant one site visit for the concurrent 4G and 5G rollout instead of two. Standardisation meant cutting the number of site types right down. Scaling meant rolling those same site types out across every market. Three years on we are ahead of schedule, at 85 percent 5G population coverage, with tests showing some of the best networks in the world and speeds above 300 Mbps. We unlocked seven times the capacity, which made fixed wireless access viable beyond the mobile business, and our fixed broadband base has doubled in three years.

On consumer we had complex journeys and too much focus on acquisition rather than the base we already had. So we simplified into digital omnichannel experiences and refocused on our existing customers. We built an analytics foundation across the footprint and marketing automation on top, so we can now put an individual recommendation, the next best offer and the next best action, into every channel. We also built listening, down to the comment a customer leaves, so our own people understand them intimately enough to act. Products followed the customer rather than the network boundary: the home does not stop at the router, so we added smart Wi-Fi optimisation; we refocused the IPTV business on the broadband line and were the only Nordic provider to grow it last year; and the smart home brings connectivity, alarming and monitoring together, with better climate at lower energy use.

Enterprise ran the same way with more complexity, a declining legacy portfolio replaced by lower-margin ICT services, and hyperscalers arriving as new competition. We simplified the journeys, so a product change that took weeks takes minutes, and we aggregate our products and our partners' products in one place. Enterprise mobile networks show what this makes possible. With Agnico Eagle and Sandvik we run the largest enterprise mobile network below the surface at a gold mine, where remote driving of equipment improves productivity and takes the driver out of a harsh and dangerous cab. With the military in Norway we provide a portable 5G network that stands up quickly in a critical situation and connects into a slice of the macro network, so critical applications run completely separate from open internet traffic. And with a large Swedish energy provider we are digitising the smart grid to optimise both distribution and consumption.

Internally we ran the same three verbs across the five Ps, ingrained into the whole company rather than run beside it. Legacy products and platforms are down more than half, which frees the capacity to invest in the new products we scale across markets. We simplified and automated the processes, and the operations and incident management process in particular, with continuous improvement, drove critical incidents down and took customer care calls down by twenty percent, which is customer experience and cost at once. And we re-baselined a crowded partner landscape into a strategic few, with more scale and lower cost for the services we buy.

Delivery improved on the back of people and tools. We trained for future skills in cloud, analytics and agile delivery. We deployed a common Jira for the entire execution portfolio, so the whole company works in one repository of what we are doing. And we put our software into a single GitHub, which is what now lets us switch on Copilot across the estate.

The environment did not cooperate. Since early 2020 we have had Covid, supply chain disruption, a war on our doorstep, energy prices, inflation, interest rates, a cost of living crisis and one of the worst advertising markets Sweden has seen, in a sector that has struggled to return anything to shareholders since privatisation. We have mitigated most of it, and it forced us to be more disciplined and more choiceful, including a radical portfolio review and finally exiting Denmark after two decades that never generated cash. Across the past three years all our core telco businesses returned to growth, reversing multi-year declines, with connectivity growing mid-single digits and services close to or beyond connectivity, IoT, data insights and security, growing at high double digits.