GTWN Lifetime Achievement Award Winner 2025
For only the third time in its 33-year history, the GTWN is bestowing the Lifetime Achievement Award to Mats Granryd, a true global leader in bringing about technology to serve humanity.
Mats was the first head of a global tech organization to officially commit to and support the UN Sustainable Development Goals, creating an industry-wide climate action roadmap to achieve net-zero by 2050, increasing mobile broadband coverage to 95% of the world’s population and working to address the mobile internet usage gap. Mats personally furthered this engagement by serving on the UN Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, being also a member of the World Bank Advisory Council on Gender and a leader with The B Team.
In so doing, Mats reinforced the GSMA as a force to be reckoned with in the industry, both from a Technology and Policy point of view, repositioning the organization to have a conscience and be conscious of privacy with integrity and credibility.
Under Mats’ leadership, the GSMA has been instrumental in the advent of the 5G Era – advocating for timely and affordable spectrum access, supporting the global rollout of 5G and mobile IoT networks and creating an eSIM solution. At the same time, he instigated Open Gateway1 to reinvigorate growth for the industry, helping developers and cloud providers enhance and deploy services rapidly across operator networks via single points of access to the world’s largest connectivity platform.
By cultivating a “Culture of People” at the GSMA with deep relationships across the sector, Mats personifies the definition and ideals of digital humanism, that of examining the impact of technology on society and humankind, designing technology to support human rights and democracy, and based on the idea that humans are responsible for their actions and thinking, that technology can be shaped to support human values.
Mats’ executive leadership at Ericsson, where he was CEO for North America and Asia, followed by his Global CEO Leadership at Tele2 further underline why he so richly deserves this Lifetime Achievement Award.
The GTWN lauds his presence at each of our GTWN/MWC Meetings – for 10 years he never once missed one of our Meetings at the Mobile World Congress – and his embrace of our Call to Action for Digital Inclusion for All.2 We recognize and celebrate his strong support of the historic Connected Women program, as well as the launch of Tech4Girls, a North American pilot program which became a global success.
Through all the efforts mentioned above and more, Mats has directly and indirectly influenced the future of our beloved industry in harnessing tech for global good and ensuring that we have a robust pipeline of diverse technical talent ready to tackle all that lies ahead.
As such, Mats Granryd not only personifies digital humanism at its best, but he also epitomizes the GTWN Slogan, “The Changing Culture of Communications…from Generation to Generation”
We congratulate him on this well-merited Lifetime Achievement Award and wish him much success in the next steps of his journey.
The GTWN International Board3
