T-Systems, the corporate business arm of Deutsche Telekom, plans to build its international business by a mixture of acquisitions and internal growth, the unit's head was quoted as saying in a newspaper.
"By 2010, we want to double our international business to 30 percent of sales," Lothar Pauly told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung in an interview published on Saturday.
"That will happen only through a mixture of our own strength - for example, through big orders - and through acquisitions," he said.
Pauly said he saw the need to grow in the UK, Italy and France, adding that take-over candidates should be strong in a particular area in which T-Systems wanted to grow, such as the auto sector, and should help internationalise the business.
He said that take-over targets with sales of above 1 billion euros would need too much time to integrate, while T-Systems did not need acquisitions that were smaller than 150 million euros in sales because it could achieve this by organic growth.
Pauly said the company would be busy until autumn with the integration of Gedas, an information technology unit purchased from carmaker Volkswagen, and for now was just observing the market.
Asked if T-Systems would be interested in parts of the SBS information technology unit of Siemens, Pauly said that SBS would not help build the international business. He added that SBS as a whole would be too big for T-Systems to buy.