Ooredoo this week formally presented its new business services division to the world and revealed that it has identified a US$10 billion revenue opportunity in the market.
To date the Qatar-based telco has largely served business customers as an adjunct to its consumer services, but over the past 18 months it has set up a dedicated unit with a staff of 1,100, Ooredoo Business, said Tom Craig, executive director of B2B at Ooredoo, on Wednesday. The telco generated around $1 billion in revenue from business services l ast year.
Across the telco’s footprint in the Middle East and Asia, "business customers are spending $10 billion," annually, Craig said. That figure mainly covers connectivity spend, split 60:40 between fixed and mobile technology; "there is probably an incremental $6 billion to this" in value-added services like hosting and customer premises equipment, he said.
74%-75% of that sum "is spent by SoHo and SME businesses," with the rest coming from large enterprises, Craig said. Ooredoo is targeting "all segments, from MNCs to microbusinesses."
The company’s footprint, which includes operators in the Gulf, North Africa, Indonesia and Myanmar, is home to 9 million businesses.
Ooredoo lacks the scale of many of its longer-established competitors in the business services space, but it insists it is not at a disadvantage.
"70% of the market value is local business," Craig said.
In addition, Ooredoo will "learn from the mistakes the other carriers have made," he said.
The telco’s strategy is to develop a single set of products and services that can be sold by all the operating companies within its footprint. "We will build once and deploy everywhere," Craig said, noting that this approach will reduce its capex by 75%-80%.
"We have no legacy," and can therefore go straight to a consistent solution across the group, he added.
Ooredoo’s first group product launch is a cloud platform for machine-to-machine (M2M) that it developed with Ericsson.
