Editorial: Making profit on data services in the future

Internet and data connectivity has completely changed our life the way we live, behave, act and express ourselves. Two major challenges for the telecom operators today are how to face the new internet players and how to remain profitable with the retail or, wholesale data products. With the new communication outlook and challenges, we need to look beyond the traditional model and devise a new unique and sustainable business model for data services.

Going beyond technology and understanding the human needs

I believe a new concept of “Integrated Business-Telco Model”, could give us the answer for data profitability and business sustainability. The core element in this business model is truly grasping the needs of the clients. Every company has their own business solutions and challenges. We need to comprehend these to a full extent to be able to provide innovative information and communication technology (ICT) propositions. By taking the clients seriously, we can increase productivity and profitability for both our clients and ourselves.

The target groups for the model will be different from country to country. The most important clients for Grameenphone in Bangladesh are initially the small and medium enterprises (SME) and the public sector. Today, operators have failed to deliver products and services to address their needs to the full. Increasing our understanding about their business processes, we will be able to give creative and relevant solutions fitting their specific business requirements. This way, in conjunction with our IT solutions, we can help to reduce costs and contribute to their turnover.

Offering services to small and medium enterprises

More concrete, the SME are interesting to us because many of these companies are not able to produce and develop systems themselves. Grameenphone (GP) can offer customized and efficient solutions and hosting their systems and applications in our IT infrastructure. Typically the systems and applications can be their pay roll system, sales system and accounting system. By giving them connectivity, we maintain and develop different modules that they can subscribe to and benefit from. In Bangladesh, the SME sector constitutes almost 60 % of the total economic activities so this could be a large customer base.

The other important segment is the public sector. For instance, in our country a good amount of the government’s annual budget is spent on improving the education system. This is for the most traditional projects improving physical infrastructure, programs for new teachers, printing educational materials and so on. By offering innovative solutions like e-book, video conferencing for lecture and internet based learning programs we can do things easier, smarter and more economical. In effect, this model creates a win-win situation for both our clients and us as an operator. The same way, we could also help the health industry creating efficient and more economical systems.

Building sustainable partnerships

The business model requires capital investment in the beginning, but with time we can add more value with complete ICT solutions. By providing customized and efficient solutions, we in GP develop a close relationship with our clients developing the solutions together as partners. Understanding the customer needs require that the clients share parts of their business models, and the partnership will be based on building trust and sharing risk. Over time this will create loyal customers based on long-term relationships.

Loyal customers, we believe, will also be interested in buying voice from GP in addition to data services. Many of the solutions we offer will in many cases not only be data and voice connectivity but could be a combination of connectivity and IT solutions to address the companies attributes. So even if there will be some costs in implementing the model in the beginning, the investments and development of sustainable relationships will make the model profitable in long-term.

Creating new businesses

In Bangladesh, the internet penetration is less than 5 % which creates tremendous opportunities. The major challenge is the efficiency and we need to break barriers to create new technology and digital vision to increase speed. Garments manufacturing is a major industry and big export basket in Bangladesh. Understanding how they are making money and integrating our technology solutions with the industry and their systems, is an interaction that can add value to their life. By simplifying the processes, we need to deliver optimized and customized technology solutions for different companies. With our solutions, we can help our customers find suitable buyers, get more clients and have more efficient systems.

This way, the “Integrated Business-Telco Model” will create spin offs beyond making profit for our company. Our customers will get customized solutions which will create efficiency and productivity. It will generate new businesses and create entrepreneurs. The business model will contribute to the country’s overall economy and growth in GDP and create employment.

Setting an example for other companies

The way I see it, ICT can be popularized and benefit the business opportunities in the country. We see how great the value of ICT is and what it can mean to this country in the future, and have strengthened our team. Our new company, called GP IT, has almost 300 people working with ICT solutions for different segments and different needs. The only way to change the scenario in Bangladesh, creating more efficient business opportunities, is more companies putting further effort on IT. We want to set an example and hope our company can inspire other companies.

To promote application and service development for the consumer segment and create a developer community, we are running a program where the developers can get access to our tele-communication systems for creating and testing their services. The successful developers will be offered attractive partnership agreement with GP. We need to embark on other initiatives to promote local software industry so that we can source more applications, services and contents locally.

We need to prepare for the future

We are witnessing a dramatic shift in technology and the future will look quite different than the present. For telecom companies it is important to adapt to new technology and realize the necessity of making a sustainable business model for our data services.

I believe that in the future we will compete on brand, services and the ICT solutions that the operators are delivering. The “Integrated Business-Telco Model” I am talking about will require organizational changes and rethinking of our business. We need to come out of our shells and understand the reality of local business needs and opportunities, and what business improvements and capabilities are all about. By taking action now, we will deliberate ourselves and prepare ourselves for the future.