Orange highlighted its IoT strategy aimed to support the enterprise and customer segments, as it looks to strengthen its position and address the entire value chain in the market.

Jean-Marc Lafond, director of IoT Innovation (pictured), said the operator had the right networks to respond to the various use cases in IoT and the potential to cover the entire value chain.

Lafond emphasised the company’s goal is to support its B2B customers through digital transformation and highlighted 5G as a key driver, as it will bring “some additional capabilities and will really reinforce what we can do already today with IoT”.

The next-generation networks will also improve current capacity on massive IoT and unlock critical services which will enable use cases in smart industries, Lafond stated, adding the latter would be deployed in the next two-to-three years.

Orange is also working on developing an enriched connectivity promise to manage a large number of devices, along with collecting and inputting data in a secure way with value-added services.

It noted the IoT market’s potential to become more mature and thus it was collaborating with the ecosystem to open new opportunities.

Lafond outlined Orange’s key IoT verticals are smart cities, Industry 4.0, e-health, and automotive and connected products.

By the end of June, Orange had 21.1 million connected objects. It also sold 1 million connected devices in Europe in 2019.