top 10 strategies for expansion in the middle east

Examples of my work

With Insights from

• Grahame Maher, CEO at Vodafone, Qatar

• Robert Drolet, Senior Vice President, Technology & Media, KIPCO

• Waleed Bin Salamah (Ph.D) Retired General, Kuwait Police

• Zeyad Al-Omar, Regulatory Director, Wataniya Telecom

+965.6636.3007 [email protected] 1

Top 10 strategies for expansion in the Middle East

Change management... a planned strategy for Telcos

By Naeem Mirza May 10th, 2010


Top 10 strategies for expansion in the Middle EastChange management... a planned strategy for Telcos

“My job is to launch this rocket to the moon”, answered a janitor at NASA. Puzzled with his answer, the visiting consultant asked for an explanation. The janitor responded that if he doesn’t clean this floor right, the astronauts will not feel good when walking on it, and if they don’t feel good, they will not be able to concentrate on taking this rocket to the moon. If the astronauts fail, I fail! This sort of commitment, passion and sense of ownership should define winning teams.

Today, if you forget your wallet at home chances are that you would not worry about it as much as if you were to forget your mobile phone, for which you would probably start looking for the first U-turn back home. Just like the temporary absence of dial tone made us agitated a few years back, our emotions also start running high when we lose coverage on our mobile phones.


Top 10 strategies for expansion in the Middle EastCont’d

As dependence on internet enabled mobile phones increases, Nielson reports growth trends in internet searches, weather forecasts, push email and maps.



Strategy # 10: Technology alone would not encourage user’s adoption rates. Service providers must take a consultative approach to educate the market and develop corporate culture to support the new functionality.

Robert Drolet, Senior Vice President, Technology & Media, KIPCO says that organizations who have tools and knowledge typically fail to apply them due to three cultural aspects:

1. People who don't recognize that there is an issue and are unwilling to talk about the negative aspects of it, usually take away the constructive criticism needed to successfully achieve the task at hand.

2. People with limited management experience in charge of projects often fail to ask fundamental questions before they initiate a project and try to find a culprit if anything goes wrong, rather than fix and learn.

3. In the Middle East there is a strong hierarchical view of organizations, where people do not want to contradict their bosses.



‘Don’t buy from them, buy from me...!’ Bad-mouthing competition to win business is a commonly observed practice in the Middle East.

As the demand for mobile phones is maturing in the Middle East, service providers have to be more strategic in maintaining and gaining their market shares, while staying competitive and profitable. Now that regional telco monopolies are facing competitive service providers who are all competing for the same market share; there is no room for guess work.

Strategy # 9: Service providers must invest into latest technologies to maintain their competitive edge.

Most users don’t know or care about the differences between Edge / HSPA or LTE technologies. Sales people find it difficult to show the value of these technical advancements in the infrastructure, due to lack of techno-commercial trainings.

Strategy # 8: For customers to enjoy the benefits of modern LTE / WiMax technologies an entire ecosystem of compatible devices, content, applications and infrastructure must exist in balance.



Nobody plans to fail; usually the failure is in the planning and proper execution of the plan. The underlying root cause is the lack of methodology to implement change smoothly. The Middle Eastern telco service providers are slowly emerging out of serving to the shear demand of internet enabled mobile phones. They are forced to think of creative ways to manage the ever flattening ARPUs and the gradually increasing CCPU of operations.

Zeyad Al-Omar, Regulatory Director, Wataniya Telecom says that most companies are not doing what is required of them.



Contrary to common belief that modern telecom infrastructure LTE (Long Term Evolution) and WiMax are competitive services, there are economies of scale that they could turn out to be complimentary services. LTE setup in rural areas could yield laws of diminishing returns, whereas complimenting LTE with WiMax as backhaul mechanism or in remote areas could be a perfect combination for keeping the costs down and providing a higher level of user experience.



With up to 100Mbps speeds, LTE / WiMax technologies will open doors for cloud computing, HD video sharing, security surveillance, mobile education and M2M applications for modern PDAs.

‘I am not going out to meet customers, if they want push email, they will come to me.’ This is one of the comments that I have personally heard from account managers. Needless to say that they did not last very long in my team.

Strategy # 7: People with conflicting attitudes towards the values of their organization should part ways sooner rather than later.

Today it is not as much of a “nice to have”, but a “must have” practise to have properly defined change management policy in the organization. Properly implementing change management principles can drive ROI, save costs, help mitigate risks and successfully achieve business objectives



Waleed Bin Salamah (Ph.D) Retired General, Kuwait Police says that consultants should be brought into organizations to implement changes if there are not enough resources in-house to do what is required.

Strategy # 6: To stay ahead, service providers must implement structured mechanisms for change management, and the vision must be made crystal clear throughout the entire organization.

As customers become more advanced and demand higher levels of network availability coupled with superior customer service, it is becoming more difficult to retain customers. With number portability, the Middle East region will see substantially different trends in customer loyalties and stable churn rates. True loyalty will stand with one’s own mobile number and not really with the company that provides the service.

Strategy # 5: Organizations that understand and provide world class customer service to their customers will retain them.



Today, with a simple push email, someone can be watching their kids play football, and yet respond to urgent work matters at the same time. Devices integrated with mobile phones exist today that can check your blood sugar levels and transmit the results to advanced health care systems, which can then automatically generate an alert at pre defined thresholds advising patients to either rush to the nearest hospital or stay at home. There will be few users who would know or care for the OFDM using IPv6 and MIMO standards between LTE or WiMax. However service providers through their marketing and consultative sales efforts must show users that modern health care devices integrated into their mobile phones can save lives; the users would welcome the change. Most organizations in the Middle East do not benchmark themselves against other players in the market, and therefore several initiatives fail.

Strategy # 4: Simplify complex technologies so that users can appreciate its value in their lives.



The only constant is change! To cater to the ever growing needs of customers, service providers are implementing newer technologies to provide them with an enriched user experience. Simply rolling out LTE or WiMax like technologies without properly defined change management process is destined to have lower ROI and will push the investment breakeven points further.

Companies are unable to perform at their full potential due to lack of proper implementation of change management methodology. There must be a structured approach to implementing change and it must have an active and visible sponsorship from the top.

Grahame Maher, CEO at Vodafone, Qatar says, over complication of issues is often the root cause of the failure of strategy and change management. To succeed it must be understood right through the whole organisation.


Strategy # 3: To ensure success, proven models like Prosci’s ADKAR change management should be exercised which suggests introducing

change in three phases:




Strategy # 2: Product management, marketing and sales teams must work together to create simpler and easy to understand value based packages for the users.

Strategy # 1: Ongoing techno commercial trainings and certifications exams must be made mandatory for sales teams who would be responsible for selling LTE / WiMax benefits.

Naeem has worked with Wataniya Telecom (Kuwait), Etisalat (UAE), Rogers AT&T (Canada), and AT&T Mobility (USA), in leading sales, strategy, change management implementations, and technology teams, and is a frequent speaker at global conferences http://kw.linkedin.com/in/telecomsexpert. Naeem is an advocate of ADKAR methodology and can be reached at [email protected] or Telecoms_Expert

This series includes advice from telecom’s who’s who in the Middle East. Upcoming best practices will focus on sales, marketing, technology, people and management.


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top 10 strategies for expansion in the middle east

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