In 2017, the leading telecommunications operator worldwide was the American company AT&T with sales of around 142.42 billion euro. The second biggest operator was the American company Verizon with 111.81 billion euro in sales.

Biggest global telecommunication operators - additional information

Founded in 1952, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, commonly known as NTT, is a Japanese telecommunications operator headquartered in Tokyo. NTT had almost 220,000 employees as of March 2012 and is partly owned by the Japanese government, which holds roughly a third of the company’s shares. NTT is the third largest company in Japan based on revenue and telecommunications spending in the country is set to reach 78.6 billion U.S. dollars in 2015.

Texas-based corporation, AT&T, is the second largest telecommunications operator in the world based on revenue in 2012. The company employed over 243,000 people in 2013 and announced worldwide operating revenue of 128.75 billion U.S. dollars. In 2013, AT&T had a total of 110 million wireless subscribers worldwide and provided almost 16.5 million broadband connections in the United States alone.

With revenue of just over 115 billion U.S. dollars, Verizon was the third largest global telecom operator in 2012, behind only NTT and AT&T. The company, founded in 1983 and based in New York, had 176,800 employees in 2013 and announced worldwide net income of 11.5 billion U.S. dollars. One of Verizon’s largest sectors is its wireless services, with which the company generated over 81 billion U.S. dollars of revenue in 2013.