Deutsche Telekom AG, Europe’s largest telephone company, said the chief executive officer, Kai-Uwe Ricke, will step down a year before his contract ends.

Mr. Ricke, 45, agreed to resign and will step down as of today, the Bonnbased company said in a statement distributed by DGAP news service today. No replacement was named. Rene Obermann, 43, head of the T-Mobile unit, will probably be named successor tomorrow, German media reported.

Mr. Ricke slashed forecasts in August and last week reported a 20% decline in third-quarter profit after wireless earnings fell and the loss of fixed-line customers accelerated. Deutsche Telekom, which is cutting 32,000 German jobs, trails European rivals in trimming positions as the Internet reduces demand for phone calls that are transmitted by copper wires.

“I have the full mandate” of the supervisory board, Mr. Ricke said on November 9 in Bonn. Two weeks earlier, the supervisory board chairman, Klaus Zumwinkel, rejected a Wirschafts-Woche magazine report that he plans to offer Mr. Ricke a three-year employment extension instead of five years as “nonsense.”

Shares of Deutsche Telekom are up 12% since Mr. Ricke became CEO in November 2002. Still, they’ve fallen 6.8% this year, the worst performance on the 24-member Bloomberg Europe Telecommunication Services Index. In the decade since the stock began trading for the first time, it has fallen about 10%.The company is valued at 57.8 billion euros, 4 billion euros less than at the start of this year.

Mr. Ricke became CEO the day Deutsche Telekom posted Europe’s biggest quarterly loss ever because of 22 billion euros in writedowns from predecessor Ron Sommer’s purchase of European high-speed wireless licenses and VoiceStream Wireless Corp. in America.

Deutsche Telekom’s debt had swelled to 64 billion euros.

Mr. Ricke’s focus on asset sales, job cuts, and debt reduction helped Deutsche Telekom return to an annual profit in 2003 and resume paying dividends the following year.