Reflections on My Trip to Kazakhstan

I recently had the honour of travelling to Almaty to lead the largest ever Finnish-Kazakhstani business delegation regarding trade and economic cooperation. Ninety representatives from 55 companies were involved in addition to Finland’s minister for European affairs and foreign trade, Alexander Stubb, and other high-ranking officials. Altogether, 13 business sectors were represented; the information and communications technology (ICT) team consisted of TeliaSonera, Nokia Siemens Networks and Comptel.

At the delegation, the key priorities outlined were attracting Finnish investments into the Kazakhstan economy and furthering innovation and new technologies between the two regions. What’s interesting is that, for the past ten years, Kazakhstan has been the third, fastest growing economy in the world after China and Qatar.

We also had the opportunity to meet with both communications service provider (CSP) KCell (a customer of Comptel’s) and Minister Stubb, which certainly proved to be a highlight of the trip. Our head of Europe East, Timo Koistinen, with regional sales director, Sergey Biryukov, accompanied me in a tournament, trying to meet all of the local service providers and naturally network with the other delegation attendees. Timo and Sergey succeeded in speaking to the other three CSPs in the region, KazakhTelecom, Tele2 and Beeline, first, and since they moved so fast, they also experienced the “magic touch”—the hand of the president of Kazakhstan on the top of the Bayterek Monument in Astana. My schedule was very tight with several meetings to ensure the whole trip went smoothly for the whole Business Team Finland.

In all, this type of event is an excellent way of promoting Finland abroad. I’m confident that many of us succeeded in building new relationships with the companies in the region while networking with our Finnish business colleagues.

Looking Forward to TELSA in Saudi Arabia

Comptel sees a lot of potential in the Middle East and Africa (MEA), and is investing to create more opportunities for being a key stakeholder in the region for its customers and partners. One country that presents immense possibilities is Saudi Arabia, which was recently ranked as the most valuable and second largest Middle Eastern mobile market with 42.9 million subscriptions.

As such, Comptel is a silver sponsor of and looks forward to meeting industry players at the Saudi Telecoms and ICT Summit (TELSA), which is going to be held from 29 to 31 January 2012 at the Four Seasons in Riyadh. The conference and exhibition will cover themes such as infrastructure development, growth strategies and investment opportunities in the Saudi telecoms industry.

Ahmed Hamza, a cluster head in the MEA region for Comptel, is going to participate in a panel discussion on harnessing the full potential of broadband to drive increased revenue, which is going to be held on 29 January at 16:30. The panel will talk about increasing ARPU through an effective broadband strategy, attracting customers through digitisation and content development, and capitalising on mobile broadband to increase revenue by focusing on sectors such as vocational education, health and agriculture. It will also discuss developing non-voice service offerings through segmented focus and niche marketing, introducing value-added services to meet customers’ needs using data mining and other business intelligence tools, assessing pricing structure and determining an optimal tariff rate. Last but not least, Ahmed will explore how operators can leverage broadband services to increase their market share.

The next day of the summit at 11:30, Kim Molin, a director of solution management at Comptel, will present a session on intelligent bandwidth management for an optimised customer experience. The presentation will cover differentiating data services with a personalised quality of experience, introducing bandwidth management tools for proactively improving customer satisfaction and increasing ARPU through intelligently up-selling new data services.

From Saudi Airlines presenting its strategic ICT transformation initiatives to gain competitive advantage in the aviation industry to Zain Saudi Arabia giving a cost-benefit analysis and critical insights into why it chose the TD-LTE variant, this summit and exhibition should be quite an exciting event with local, regional and international telecom operators, regulators, service providers, wholesale carriers, government agencies, vendors and corporations together under one roof. It’s also interesting to note that the conference organizers have provided workshops on how telecoms can provide solutions to the public and oil and gas sectors.

We welcome you to visit and interact with Comptel experts at our TELSA exhibition stand (G 25).