Telefónica’s new war map: fiber, 5g and a dash into defence by 2035

Madrid, Thursday. Marc Murtra walked into the shareholder bunker, dropped the buzzwords and set a stopwatch: Europe’s top-teleco crown by 2030, world podium by 2035. No consulting clichés, just hard targets and a side order of cyber-arsenal.

The plan, baptised in November, is now a live countdown. 2026 is the first gate: 10 Gbps fiber layers across Spain and Brazil, 5G grids densified in Germany and the UK, a B2B stack where every packet is cloud-wrapped and threat-scanned before it reaches the customer router. Murtra told investors he will fund it with the same weapon he used last year—scalpel-sharp cost extraction. “More efficiency, more automation, more focus,” he repeated, sounding more like a logistics colonel than a telecom president.

Defence contracts and the peruvian exit cheque

While rivals chase Netflix bundles, Telefónica will pitch encrypted phones and sovereign 5G cores to ministries. The pivot is already budgeted: part of the €1.8 bn capex envelope for 2025-26 will be routed to security-cleared subsidiaries that can sell “defence-grade” network slices. The logic? Margins on cyber SKUs sit 12-15 points above consumer broadband, according to internal decks leaked to TechFlux.

That war chest is being topped up by a retreat that is almost complete. Peru, Uruguay, Ecuador, Colombia and Chile have been flipped in 18 months, freeing €5.4 bn in balance-sheet ballast. Hispanoamérica is no longer a growth story; it is a cash tap to buy European spectrum licences.

Ai or just better autoresponders?

Murtra promised “hyper-personalisation” driven by artificial intelligence, but refused to name models, vendors or data lakes. Insiders say the first visible element will be a customer-service bot that predicts why you are calling before the first ring ends. If it works, churn could fall 40 basis points; if it hallucinates, Spain’s consumer ombudsman is waiting with a €20 m fine template already drafted.

The 55-year-old engineer closed with a neologism that no one asked for: proditomanía—the delusion that everyone around you wants your downfall. He declared the malady non-existent inside Telefónica’s curved Madrid headquarters. Shareholders clapped, but the real applause came from bond traders: the company’s 2029 note tightened 8 basis points by close of trading, pricing in the promise that the “airplane will land on time” in 2026. The next radar ping is Q3 earnings; miss those numbers and proditomanía might look less like a fantasy and more like prophecy.