What brought you to your new role as director of International Business at A1 Group this June?
I’m not a new kid in the industry, but started 25 years ago at Belarusian mobile operator Velcom, which is now A1 Belarus. Velcom was just starting up at the time and I was one of its early employees. The knowledge I picked up on every area of rolling out such an operation was extremely valuable.
Around two-thirds of my career has been in financial roles, but I switched more recently into a business development role at A1 Belarus before moving to A1 Group in Austria in 2018. I’ve worked in fields ranging from bringing a photovoltaic facility into the grid to helping kick-start A1’s ICT and cloud business in Belarus.
How else have your experience and skills prepared you for this role?
Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to meet and work with a wide variety of people from different cultures, from engineers to data scientists, and gain practical experience. This has given me good knowledge of areas such as data-driven customer engagement and technical aspects of the business.
Meanwhile, as well as gaining my new role, I’m heading the marketing and sales team at A1 Group. This gives me an end-to-end view in helping understand what resources are required on the wholesale side to serve customers.
How have you found your first 100 or so days in your new role?
I’ve done tons of learning, getting to understand the flow of processes in this part of the industry. I’ve been meeting my new colleagues in the International Business, as well as many customers, suppliers and vendors, to learn new perspectives on the wholesale market.
There’s been lots happening at A1 since I’ve been here. We’re in the middle of finalising the deployment and commercial launch of new rich communication services and voice trading, routing and billing platforms, as well as some technology steps to allow IMSI roaming sponsorship at a global level.
We’re also opening a new phase of operations with our holding company, majority shareholder América Móvil, that focuses on signalling exchange.
What do you view as the biggest current challenges and opportunities in the global wholesale industry?
I see the wholesale area as quite challenging, with one of the main challenges for operators being to maintain their unique selling points and relevance to customers. There has been a clear downturn in traditional revenue sources from voice and SMS, while the telco proposition is being squeezed by the tech giants, content players and aggregators. It’s also a capital-intensive industry with inflationary and opex pressures.
Yet I see a lot of opportunities in the industry too. The current climate is exciting and energetic, with lots of technology developments we can harness. But it’s important that we take a customer-centric approach.
It’s also increasingly important to maintain efficiencies and a technology edge, working on virtualisation, APIs and cloud technologies, as well as ensuring interoperability and security on a wide range of devices. In the wholesale industry, we need to be agile, enhance our partnerships, and be up to standard when it comes to speed and quality of services.
How do you see the way forward for A1 Group on the wholesale side?
In light of the challenges in the market, we need to choose our battlefields wisely, focusing on selected activities that offer a return on investment and maybe discontinuing those in certain legacy areas. We also can’t build all solutions on our own, so we need good partnerships and customer engagement. We need to develop new technologies and growth opportunities, while paying attention to areas such as security.
Meanwhile, the company has been reinvigorating its talent, making it effective in operating amid commercial change, and we enjoy an excellent reputation for quality. We need to also deploy our investments in the right place – an area where I can help in pinpointing opportunities due to my financial background. These are not trivial issues, but by taking these approaches, I’m optimistic about the company’s future.
