Can you give us a brief idea about your organisation and its recent activities?
CMC has been providing services for over 28 years, serving the data communication needs of wholesale carriers and government clients across the globe.
Our main business is Africa & Middle East. CMC owns in excess of 70 POPS in Africa and 19 in the Middle East which are integrated into other wholesale carrier partner networks in order to deliver a global wholesale footprint to the carrier community .
This insures a cost-effective, scalable and resilient network that is committed to the wholesale environment and their respective clients.
In recent activity, we opened a USA office to focus on the USA carrier base requiring services into Africa.
What have been CMC’s highlights and developments so far in 2017?
In February we announced that the Carlyle Group, a global alternative asset manager, had acquired a majority shareholding of CMC.
In May our CEO Martin Springer talked about this on JSA TV live from ITW 2017 in Chicago.
And CMC launched its new portfolio of internet products, designed to be sold to the carrier market as a geo-diverse link to the primary MPLS or Layer 2 P2P.
What are the major trends in the wholesale market and how is CMC planning to capitalise on those?
The market has undergone considerable changes since the landing of four fibre international submarine cables in recent years. The dramatic increase in international bandwidth not only ended Africa’s dependence on limited and expensive satellite bandwidth, but the fall in the cost of data access ensured that services have been made affordable for a large section of the population.
This in turn has opened up Africa but it has become a very price-sensitive market due to this additional choice.
What do you hope to achieve out of your attendance at the Capacity events?
We aim to look for business opportunities in Africa and new suppliers and catch up with our existing client base.
