Q. What changes in demand has the company seen since the start of the pandemic and how is OTEGLOBE meeting those needs?
Global pandemic has imposed lockdown in many countries, which in turn restricted mobility and sent people working from home. Hence, we have recently seen a considerable Internet traffic increase. We have urgent demands from existing customers to increase their Internet bandwidth, which we managed to do in less than 10 days, thanks to the automations of our network. Our traffic increased by 25-30% related to peak values, while its spread changed from the bell shaped curve to a more flattened curve that accounts for a 40-50% total volume increase. Our customers have also been looking for diversity and resilience as Internet service outages are deemed unacceptable and would be disastrous under these global circumstances. What is amazing here is that whole societies, organizations and our industry in particular have been preparing for so long for this shifting towards the digital era, but it took a virus spread to implement everything overnight!
This unprecedented situation has put additional strain on our service delivery and operations but as the leading carrier in S.E. Europe, OTEGLOBE has been well prepared for any contingency and has relied on its state-of-the art network to serve its customers in the best possible way.
Q. How is OTEGLOBE ensuring the uptime of its network and leveraging its existing diversity/resilience in the face of the pandemic?
Our long-term strategy has always been investing in our network and creating unique solutions to meet our customers’ needs in the region, taking advantage of OTELGOBE’s geographic position. OTEGLOBE’s European optical backbone network, designed with a full mesh architecture over 4+ diverse routes across Europe, is fully - protected and resilient. Our unique proposition to connect Europe to Asia through Greece over our diverse and protected terrestrial network combined with the AAE-1 subsea cable, where OTEGLOBE is a full member and landing party, ensures resilience and diversity in the region, which is more critical today than ever before.
Our Data centres and POPs remain fully operational and are fully equipped to ensure their continuous operation. We have also designed and operate our IP voice network with a high level of redundancy, maintaining more than 300 direct interconnections for global coverage and seamless operation.
Q. What measures has OTEGLOBE implemented to ensure business continuity as well as to support its customers and employees?
Upon realizing this might be an extremely unusual situation we initiated as part of our BCP plan and Risk Assessment procedures a specific "Pandemic Preparedness Plan". detailing every possible scenario, as well as all response actions and measures that could be required. With the health and safety of our employees and partners always being of paramount importance we decided from the very beginning of the pandemic in Europe, before even the state's precautionary measures, to protect our people and contribute to the national effort against Covid-19 by working remotely. ven now with our return, we take small steps towards the "new normal" ensuring our employees stay safe and feel safe. Upon the outbreak, we also requested confirmation from our critical vendors and partners that they have robust BCP in place so as to make sure that our supply chain and off-net services will face no impact. We have been and still are continuously monitoring and assessing the situation. We are also committed to informing all our customers well in advance and as necessary in case of any changes in our BCP and risk assessment procedures.
Q. How has the pandemic affected OTEGLOBE’s financial performance? Will this impact future R&D, innovation and reinvestment?
As a result of the lockdown and its consequences, we have recently seen traffic increase in both our voice and data networks, resulting in solid revenues at least for the first half of 2020. However, we do expect that travel restriction during the touristic period will affect the roaming traffic. Nevertheless, its extent on our voice revenues cannot be safely predicted today. The B2B segment is also likely to be affected and the lower corporate spending could have a negative impact on enterprise revenues for us, but it all depends on the longevity of the current situation.
Reinvesting in virtualization and automation that will help streamline all aspects of our operation such as our working environment and sales channels, network, supply chain etc. will be accelerated as part of our digital transformation plan and are considered as our top priorities.
Q. Looking ahead, what will be the long-term impact of Covid-19 on OTEGLOBE?
Although we expect the pandemic to be brief, the longer it lasts the more our financial priorities and strategy will have to change, e.g. we might have to scale back new CAPEX investments towards maintenance activities to conserve cash or build new partnerships to speed up time to market.
OTEGLOBE is a strong company that has managed not only to survive but grow during the global financial crisis of a decade ago and the deep recession Greece underwent. We shall remain committed to offering the best possible services to our customers and we shall do whatever it takes to meet their needs and our goals!
