Deutsche Telekom to Open 50 New Stores as Bernstein Cuts Rating and Target
Published on 09/27/2026 at 14:10 | Editorial boerse-global.de
Deutsche Telekom is betting that face-to-face selling can close the gap between the fiber it has built and the customers actually paying for it. Starting this year, the Bonn-based carrier intends to roll out 50 new or redesigned shops across Germany, including pop-up formats, with the expansion running through 2027. The goal is straightforward: convert more households to full fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) contracts and turn its hefty infrastructure spending into paying subscribers faster.
The numbers explain the urgency. Only about 17 percent of households that Telekom's fiber network can already physically reach have signed up for a corresponding plan. The flexible store concepts are meant to sit precisely where buildout is finished or underway, lowering the barrier to signing a contract through direct, in-person contact. Management is targeting a markedly stronger increase in FTTH contract customers from the current year onward.
Mobile Buildout and a Rising Appetite for Data
Alongside the fixed-line offensive, the DAX group continues to expand its mobile infrastructure. Those efforts now bring 5G coverage to 93 percent of Germany's land area and 99 percent of households, with improved connections also added along the Berlin–Rostock rail line and the A19 motorway. The steady capacity upgrades are driven by users' growing hunger for data: traffic on the network is climbing by roughly 30 percent every year.
The retail push is not the only front where the company is courting customers. On the digital side, Telekom is broadening its entertainment lineup — on Tuesday it integrated Warner Bros. Discovery's HBO Max streaming service into its German MagentaTV platform, letting subscribers book the programming directly through the company's own interface. Mobile services are expanding beyond classic tariffs as well: on September 21, the group launched T-Travel, a global platform for digital SIM cards that lets users buy mobile data packages for more than 200 destinations and activate them straight onto eSIM-capable devices. Ten days earlier, on September 15, it introduced the Product Emissions Calculator, a tool for determining the CO? footprint of individual products.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying Deutsche Telekom?
Bernstein Steps Back
Analysts, however, took a more cautious view of the overall picture. On Friday, Bernstein downgraded Deutsche Telekom shares from "Outperform" to "Market-Perform" and simultaneously trimmed its price target from EUR 37 to EUR 28.10. The brokerage pointed chiefly to intensifying competition in the German fixed-line market, adding that it holds a neutral stance on subsidiary T-Mobile US and flagging lingering uncertainty over a possible merger with its US partner.
Shareholder returns remain a supporting factor. Under its ongoing buyback program, the company repurchased 2,945,800 of its own shares between September 14 and 18. Since the current tranche began on August 10, the total has reached 14,005,765 shares.
Market Reaction
Investors largely shrugged off the downgrade. The stock ended Friday's session with a modest gain of 0.5 percent at EUR 27.09, giving the group a market capitalization of EUR 128.60 billion on a year-to-date basis. Whether the new sales formats deliver will matter greatly in the coming quarters, as the company looks to speed up the payback on its multibillion-euro network investments.
Away from operations, the group also drew criticism on Friday: in Bielefeld, Deutsche Telekom received the Big Brother Award, a negative prize, in the "preventive" category.
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