Q4 2012: An Update on Comptel’s Business and Strategy

Today, we announced Comptel’s financials for the fourth quarter of 2012, which closes my second year as the CEO of Comptel. The fourth quarter was the best quarter in 2012 in terms of net sales and operating profit.  The year ended with us winning two important customer contracts that demonstrate how our focused investments in Comptel Fulfillment and Comptel Social Links have started to bear fruit.

We signed the largest Analytics deal in Comptel’s history with Robi Axiata in Bangladesh, a joint venture of NTT DoCoMo and Axiata Group.  We have a good base of 15 customers now for our advanced analytics and one major win and three whole suite of products of the new Comptel Fulfillment 8 release, which we launched in the first half of 2012.

We continued our strategy execution and investments according to our 2012 plan. Our net sales grew by 7.4 per cent which is more than the approximate 4 per cent market growth. As stated in my Q3 blog, we are consciously building partnerships to strengthen our sales channel and to complement our portfolio. The new CMO organization we established in Q3 has progressed with the sales efficiency activities, including partnership enablement, which will be a key for our growth strategy. The most recently signed up partner is the mobile broadband company Nokia Siemens Networks.

The R&D investments continued to support the strategic Event – Analysis – Action vision in key portfolio areas.  The first half of the year was about developing Comptel Fulfillment 8 and integrating Comptel Social Links to our portfolio. The second half was about the key customer wins, new business use cases and researching the appliance model for analytics. Our ambition is to get analytics as an integral part of the other elements in our portfolio.  For or example service order orchestration “powered by advanced analytics” or personalized policy control and charging “powered by advanced analytics”.  You can visit us at Mobile World Congress (MWC13) at 6C30 booth in the Hall 6 to hear more.

Finally, I would like to mention our services business, where we succeeded to significantly improve the operational performance by implementing the productivity measures in Q2 and Q3. This will give us a good basis for 2013. We were also able to exceed our targets in new services such as Managed Services and Consulting in 2012.

In Q4 we fine-tuned our strategy execution plans to ensure we continue with focused activities in all areas.

Overall in the year 2012, we won 13 new customers and signed 15 significant orders, valued over MEUR 0.5. We will be busy also in 2013 to deliver our top-line and especially to ensure and improve our profitability. We have an exciting and interesting journey ahead in 2013.

Comptel Comes to Turkey to Make Data Beautiful

For the telecom industry, spring is always such an interesting time due to the variety of events taking place. Most of us divide the season into the periods of ‘before and after Mobile World Congress’ and ‘by Management World’. Comptel’s no exception to this—we are participating in a number of events in the first half of 2012, as we continue to build our presence closer to customers, fulfilling the promise of growth to shareholders.

To obtain new customers and to make existing ones even happier, we continuously look for opportunities to operate in their local markets. So, this week, we are attending Eurasia Com in Istanbul, Turkey. Our CEO, Juhani Hintikka, along with other Comptelians, will be on hand at the conference and the networking event on the 20^th of March, which we have sponsored in celebration of the opening of a new office in the country.

Personally, I regret that I cannot attend the event. Istanbul is a wonderful city with a mixture of Asian, European and Middle Eastern cultures. I lived in Istanbul when the famous WAP-era was about to start and there was talk about bringing Internet to everyone’s pockets. In those days, we had a hint of what was to come in mobile, but both technology and understanding of end-user needs needed a few rounds of evolution before the mobile Internet could truly take off. The business models between the network providers and service and applications providers have also developed drastically.

Another milestone I can recall from my experience in Turkey’s telecom landscape happened about five years ago, when the industry started to talk about customer experience. I had the privilege, with a former colleague, to benchmark where one of the Turkish service providers were in terms of customer experience, compared to one of the leading Western European service providers. Since then, the situation of Turkey’s telecommunications has changed quite a bit. In fact, according to the CIA World Fact Book, it is a “comprehensive telecommunications network undergoing rapid modernization and expansion especially in mobile-cellular services.”

Turkey indeed is an important market for Comptel, and we aim to continue building a strong presence there. I wish a great event to all of the Eurasia Com participants and hope you’ll attend the networking event introducing us and our “Making Data Beautiful” messaging to the country.