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Iliad, Mother house of Free is an operator who has an insolent growth of 10 billion euros in turnover last year, and 50 million subscribers.
Franceinfo : Thomas Raynaud, you have just published your financial results. How to explain this strong growth, in a mature European market, since everyone today has a mobile phone subscription?
Thomas Raynaud: It’s true and somewhere, it’s a good sign. It means that we have done our job as a telecoms operator. Today, in France, thanks to investments from the past 12 years, we are present in 29,000 municipalities on optical fiber. This means that more than 90% of French people have access to free fiber. And we cover more than 92% of the French population with our 5G network.
You are present in three markets in Europe mainly, Italy, Poland and France. On the French market, you won last year 668,000 new subscribers. How do you do ?
The first concern for the French today is purchasing power. And somewhere, free, it’s anti-inflation weapon. We have made a very strong promise, since 2012, we have not touched at the prices of our two mobile packages. And we even went further since until 2027, our two mobile packages will not move a penny.
In the price war that exists between all mobile operators, do you think you are first?
In any case, we made the choice of transparency, constancy, generosity too. Our offers are more and more generous in terms of data, destinations abroad. And the French are not mistaken.
But how do you make money on a Free subscription?
On the one hand by retaining you, thanks to the quality of our offers and we have made demanding choices. We decided to internalize all key functions. And we are convinced that doing better does not necessarily cost more. There is never the slightest compromise at Free on quality. We have invested more than 10 billion euros in recent years in optical fiber, on our 5G networks. It is this model where we are extremely payable to cost control. And it involves an internalization and also through the simplicity of our offers.
And that differentiates from your competitors from having everything internally?
Yes. Another differentiation, we have only one brand: the Free brand. We do not have secondary marks, with very differentiated offers. This is the simplicity of our range of offers. It is performance, innovation too. And the French know this. We have our star product which is the freebox, which is internalized, which is designed in our research and development laboratories in Paris and Montpellier.
But the others too do the same, right?
No, this is an exception. We are the only telecoms operator in Europe. And that was Xavier Niel’s vision in 2002, when he launched the first Freebox and the first “triple play” package. We made the choice of internalization on how to create and manufacture a number of telecom equipment.
You also offer the pro version of the “cat”, the assistant developed by the French Mistral, for free for twelve months, to all your subscribers. Is it a call product?
This is a decision that we made at the time of the summit of artificial intelligence held in Paris in late February. And it seemed natural to us to associate with a world leader in artificial intelligence, Mistral, who happens to be French. And it’s a bit like the meaning of Free’s story. It is democratizing digital, democratizing technology.
“We decided to offer the premium version of the cat, which is an artificial intelligence assistant, to our 15 million subscribers, for twelve months.”
Thomas Raynaud, Managing Director of Iliadin franceinfo
So for twelve months, they will have free access to this product which costs otherwise 14.99 euros, when you are not a free subscriber.
Xavier Niel has also invested in Mistral. The Iliad group is obviously of the landline, mobile, but also other activities: Cloud, Data Centers, a research laboratory on AI founded by Xavier Niel, Kyutai, also exists. And a huge investment of 3 billion euros, announced at the AI summit last month. Today, concretely, what do these activities represent in your turnover?
Today, they represent less than 5% of our turnover. But we are convinced that we are at a time of rocking, that the story is playing in front of your eyes. We cannot let artificial intelligence be the monopoly of some great powers such as America and China. Europe must play its own card. And this is exactly the meaning of all the initiatives we have taken in different trades: data centers, calculation power, cloud. We will invest three billion euros in these new professions. We have already been present for five years in these trades, but we have to speed up.
“Our continent must accelerate because this is what is played out with artificial intelligence, it is not only the competitiveness of our economies, but it is also our values.”
Thomas Raynaudin franceinfo
It is also our collective imagination. Because through AI, through generative AI, it is the way we learn, which we educate, which we are entertained. And Europe cannot remain next to this revolution which takes place before our eyes.
So, today, these are very heavy investments and a very low share of your turnover. But you think in the long term, in a few years, will it evolve?
Our positioning in Iliad is not to develop an artificial intelligence language, but to invest in infrastructure dedicated to artificial intelligence. That is to say that, so that there are companies in Europe, which develop languages, which maintain them, which make them available, like Mistral with the cat, we need computing power. And today we have the first computing power dedicated to artificial intelligence at Iliad. We also need data centers. Today we operate 15 data centers, almost everywhere in Europe. And we will invest 2.5 billion euros in this activity. We are in an economy of knowledge, in an economy of data. And to host, to make your data work, you need what we call data centers.
You are trying to be part of the sovereign clouds, to have this label. Will it bring in professionals, other customers that you do not have?
We already have more than 150 large companies that use cloud solutions from the Iliad group. We also have the emergency call platform, the 112 which is hosted with us. And we see, what is quite interesting is that with this geopolitical shock that we have been witnessing for two months now, we are starting to see certain companies that were present in the United States which decides to relocate or duplicate their data on European soil. And especially at Scaleway, our cloud subsidiary.
