Strategic Intelligence: Telecom Services Sector Scorecard Q3 2025 Update

There was little activity on the thematic screen of the analyst’s telecom services sector scorecard in Q3 2025. SK Telecom maintained its position at the top of the thematic rankings, ahead of three of Europe’s heavyweights: Orange, Telefónica, and Deutsche Telekom. The highest-ranked US company is Verizon, in ninth position on the thematic rankings, just ahead of Comcast in 10th.

Key Highlights

• Cloud is a key theme for the telecom services sector, with a weighting of 10% on the thematic screen (the same weighting as 5G and ESG). In September 2025, Deutsche Telekom simplified its cloud offering with the launch of T Cloud. It offers customized sovereign cloud services to governments and enterprises in Europe, ranging from a fully closed and fully sovereign solution managed by Deutsche Telekom to a multi-cloud solution orchestrated by the German operator.
• According to the analyst’s Ismail Patel, T Cloud gives Deutsche Telekom a distinct advantage against the US hyperscalers, promising them what those companies cannot: full sovereignty and data security. To protect their dominant position in the European market, the US hyperscalers must figure out how to ensure they can be trusted with data stored on European servers.

Scope

• This sector scorecard provides a top-down, comprehensive outlook for the key players in the telecom services sector over the next two years, based on the key themes set to transform their industry landscape.

Reasons to Buy

• Companies that invest in the right themes become success stories. Those that miss the important themes in their industry end up as failures.
• The analyst's thematic research ecosystem is a single, integrated global research platform that provides an easy-to-use framework for tracking all themes across all companies in all sectors. It has a proven track record of identifying the important themes early, enabling companies to make the right investments ahead of the competition and secure that all-important competitive advantage.
• The analyst has developed a unique thematic methodology for ranking all major companies in all major sectors based on their relative strength in the big themes that are impacting their industries.
• First, we identify the top 10 themes transforming a sector across four categories (tech, macro, industry, and ESG). We also rank themes in order of priority by examining activity levels across 200 million alternative data signals, including patents, jobs, deals, filings, social media, and news.
• Second, we research each theme in detail, examining the value chain, key players, and trends. Additionally, we examine the impact of each theme across the 20 industries we cover. Our 200 million signals help identify the leading adopters of a theme in each sector.
• Finally, using our sector scorecards, we rank the companies most likely to succeed in a sector over the next five years.