Tim CEO Pietro Labriola
Tlc, Labriola: “Wild competition”
“I think of equal rules for everyone, which protect consumers and the market. When I was younger, telecommunications were a market with watertight compartments: whoever sold telephony, sold telephony, period; and whoever sold energy, did only that. Now whoever makes energy also sells telecommunications”. This is the reflection of Pietro Labriola, CEO of Tim, in an interview given to Il Giornale and relaunched by Ansa in which he asks: “Who checks that there are no cross-subsidies, that they do not sell a low-margin service, such as connectivity, without earning from it to make high profits with energy instead?”.
This is a “wild competition” that “contributes to further destroy the telecommunications market. It is therefore necessary to rethink the rules. And this also applies to relationships with tech giants”, Labriola underlines. When asked if he is suggesting canceling the so-called net neutrality, the CEO of Tim replies: “I’m talking about equal rules for everyone. In the United States it has been revised, in Brazil they are working on it. Even in the United Kingdom they are talking about it. I don’t think it should be a taboo in Europe either – he adds -. Sooner or later we will also have to consider dumping, this unknown in the Italian code. The time has come to restart the world of telecommunications in Europe and in Italy”.
Labriola responds to those who have argued that the sale of the network will cost the new Tim no less than 2 billion a year in rent. “A short-sighted and crude reconstruction – he explains -. Of the 2 billion that we will spend for the network rental, about 700 million are the cost of energy that Tim would have had to shoulder anyway if it had kept the network. Furthermore, without the sale to Kkr we would have had to invest no less than 10 billion in the next 5 years to strengthen the fiber structure”. The total benefits that Tim will obtain between sales, earnouts and refund of the concession fee amounts to “roughly around 5 billion, which we can allocate to investments for growth or even forms of remuneration for the members”, he concludes.
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