DRINKING THE ORANGE JUICE AT INSIGHTS 2025

Orange Business used its annual analyst event – Insights – to demonstrate its progress on a transformation project that seeks to slow its rate of EBITDA decline. Executing this vision, Orange Business is looking to four core levers, as summarised below:

• Digital trust. Orange Business views digital trust as a key commercial differentiator and ultimately seeks to leverage its European passport (status as a company headquartered in Europe) to drive growth and assuage enterprises’ geopolitical anxieties. To do so, the unit has developed a sovereign infrastructure and application portfolio. There are early indications that this strategy is bearing fruit, with the unit stating that sovereign services can, on average, be sold at a 10-15% premium, mainly driven by demand across industry verticals such as finance, public sector, healthcare, utilities and defence. Certainly, in providing sovereign compute, Orange Business faces significant competition from telcos, hyperscalers and regional data centre operators. Ultimately, it is very unlikely to become the leading pan-European sovereign AI player but instead, will form one part of a growing federation of European sovereign providers.
• 'Platformisation'. Orange Business seeks to be an industry leader in providing on-demand and scalable access to the ‘three C’s’: connectivity, cybersecurity and cloud services. To achieve this goal, it has created a greenfield IT stack to provide the necessary agility and flexibility required for platform business models. This IT stack is built with several IT vendor partners, which it holds co-innovation agreements with. The solution achieves interoperability by ensuring partner alignment to standards outlined by the TM Forum and MEF. This basis has enabled it to launch the Evolution Platform, a network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform that enables enterprises to consume the three C’s on demand, based on first- and third-party solutions, as well as the Live Intelligence platform that offers a range of plug-and-play generative AI (GenAI) tools.
• AI everywhere. Orange Business views AI as a vital lever to reduce its rate of EBITDA decline. There are both internal and external elements to this strategy. Internally, Orange Business has created a new team dedicated to data and AI, and has trained more than 50% of its workforce in AI-related skills; programmes we see most major operators embarking on. Likewise, with Live Intelligence, it productised what originally was a tool for internal use for its enterprise customers – this enables it to be its own proof point. Externally, Orange’s business unit has used AI to enable its clients to transform their customer experiences and to optimise telephony services. Again, many operators are pursuing similar initiatives. Perhaps more unique, though, is the emphasis Orange Business has placed on agentic AI as a vehicle of growth – this extends to a goal to supplement all new products from 2026 with these capabilities. This focus on AI is bearing fruit. Orange Business projects that its AI initiatives will generate more than EUR600 million additional value in the next 3 years between cost reductions and additional business generation.
• Sustainability. Orange Business has remained resolute in its sustainability commitments, seeing this as a long-term differentiator. Examples of this commitment include eco-design principles embraced in all new products and providing customers with carbon reporting capabilities.