e& PPF Telecom Group is emerging as one of the main telecom platforms in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). In 2025, the joint venture (JV) generated €2.413 billion in revenue, with 12.2 million mobile subscribers, 1.1 million fixed broadband customers and 1.1 million pay-TV subscribers. It is a particularly strong challenger on mobile in its operating markets, being the third largest operator in Slovakia (after the integration of the newly acquired UPC), Hungary, and Bulgaria, and even ranking second in Serbia. In 2018, PPF Telecom acquired Telenor’s telecom assets in Central and Eastern Europe in a deal valued at around EUR 2.8 billion, before launching the Yettel brand in March 2022. The e& PPF joint venture was set up in August 2023, when e&, the UAE telecom company also known as Emirates Telecommunications Group, signed an agreement to acquire a controlling stake in PPF Telecom’s CEE assets; the transaction was completed in October 2024. Today, e& holds a majority stake in the service and infrastructure businesses of PPF Telecom Group. PPF fully retains its Czech telecom assets as a strategic home market and the JV solely focuses on the rest of the region. The core strategy of the JV in the CEE is scale & convergence: preserve leading or strong mobile positions, add fixed assets, and expand through multi-play bundles across the region, aiming to reduce churn and increase monetization rather than subscriber growth only. A second strategic pillar is infrastructure-led expansion. The group is building network assets in each market, pushing 5G investments and wholesale FTTH infrastructure expansion to better compete in mobile and fixed segments. A third strategic pillar that has been in full action in recent years is M&A operations, as shown with the JV’s acquisitions in Serbia and Slovakia. In 2025 e& PPF acquired Serbian fixed operator SBB, which serves more than 600 thousand fixed wireline internet subscribers. The acquisition improved the e&PPF’s position on the Serbian market from a primarily mobile-based service into a converged platform, with broadband and TV now becoming key growth engines, allowing Yettel Serbia to compete with the local telecom leader MTS on convergent services, and with a step ahead of A1 who is just starting fixed operations in the country. The group now has over 4 million RGUs in Serbia across mobile, broadband and pay TV. In Slovakia, the group is following a similar logic through the UPC Slovakia acquisition, representing over 140 thousand Pay TV subscribers in Q1 2026 according to Dataxis data, which should deepen the fixed offer and expand the group’s ability to cross-sell into cable households. These are now adding up to O2 Slovakia’s existing 2.3 million RGU. The Serbian SBB transaction signals a reshaping within...
