Deutsche Telekom's chairman, Mr Ron Sommer, has been telling his staff for months that, when fusion fever hits the telecommunications industry, the German firm must emerge in the dominant position.
"I don't want to be Opel to General Motors but Daimler to Chrysler," he said.
Just 16 months after Deutsche Telekom's privatisation, Mr Sommer has transformed the company from a creaking, state-owned monopoly into one of the world's biggest and most dynamic telecommunications giants. And he has left colleagues and competitors in no doubt that the proposed merger with Telecom Italia is only the beginning of a shopping spree that could make Deutsche Telekom the biggest telephone company in the world.
Mr Sommer already has his eye fixed on the American company, Sprint and Britain's Cable and Wireless and he predicts that, within a few years, there will be only four or five telecoms providers in Western Europe. The German government, which owns 72 per cent of the shares in Deutsche Telekom, is encouraging Mr Sommer's expansion strategy - much to the consternation of Mannesmann, Germany's second biggest telephone company.
"Instead of intervening on behalf of the whole German economy, the government is acting on behalf of a single company," complains Mr Klaus Esser, Mannesmann's new chairman.
Former state monopolies in smaller countries, such as Ireland and Belgium, are especially vulnerable to takeover by the big four European firms - Deutsche Telekom, British Telecom, France Telecom and Spain's Telefonica - or by one of the US giants. And the merger between Deutsche Telekom and Telecom Italia signals the end of the era of joint ventures, through which former monopolies tested the water of international competition.
Global One, Deutsche Telekom's alliance with France Telecom and Sprint, is now doomed - not least because Mr Sommer neglected to tell his French counterpart in advance about his wooing of Telecom Italia.
Mr Sommer will focus instead on buying up as many of Europe's former telecommunications monopolies as he can get his hands on. He has identified the well-developed system of land lines and fixed telephone connections as the crown jewels of any telecommunications network - and the former state monopolies still have most of these.
Controlling home and office telephone lines will allow a provider to dominate such services as Internet access and electronic shopping.
A further element in Mr Sommer's strategy is to develop Deutsche Telekom's online service , TOnline, into a world-wide brand that would compete with such giants as America On Line (AOL). Mr Sommer has already clashed with Bertelsmann, which owns part of AOL over his proposal to create lower telephone charges for T-Online subscribers and he is preparing for a head-to-head battle with the media giant over control of electronic shopping.
Although the merger with Telecom Italia has wrong-footed many of Mr Sommer's competitors, the future is not without potential problems.
Mr Sommer plans to bring new Deutsche Telekom shares worth $10 billion (£7.88 billion) onto the European stock market at the end of June. But profits could be hit by price cuts of up to 60 per cent which Mr Sommer introduced to strangle fledgling competitors at birth. Profits for 1999 are expected to be just $1 billion - less than half the figure Deutsche Telekom hoped for at the beginning of the year.
Unfortunately for Mr Sommer, this fall in profits is likely to become visible at just the moment he hopes to sell his new shares - a potentially disastrous combination of circumstances.
If the Deutsche Telekom boss is worried, he is showing little sign of it - he just bid £11 billion for the British mobile phone company One2One.
