During the 15th Telecom Review Leaders’ Summit held at the InterContinental Dubai Festival City, Telecom Review welcomed Fida Kibbi, vice president, head of marketing, communications, sustainability & corporate responsibility, Ericsson MEA, in person. In an exclusive interview, Kibbi elaborated on how Ericsson is shaping an exciting and positive future with the power of limitless connectivity as well as the company’s commitment to sustainability, responsible business, and digital inclusion.
Ericsson is gearing to create connections that make the unimaginable possible. How are you trying to shape an exciting and positive future with the power of limitless connectivity?
We have relaunched our purpose and vision at Ericsson. We are talking about imagining a world with limitless connectivity and all the great opportunities that advanced connectivity technologies like 5G, IoT, and the cloud can bring to our world. These include consumers, businesses, and society as a whole.
What we are currently doing is just a reflection of how technology is really enabling our world to advance, enabling people to connect in a different way, and enabling all the great experiences for consumers — from gaming, video streaming, connecting, talking to each other, and even visualizing the hyper presence of people in a virtual world.
At the same time, this connectivity and the limitless world will bring vast opportunities for businesses and enterprise digitization as enterprises and businesses are now on a big journey to accelerate digital transformation. This is where they can reap the benefits of connectivity, technology, and digitalization in their business; by revising the business model and adopting new technologies as part of the new business model.
With that, we are saying that a limitless number of opportunities will be enabled by the connectivity that enterprises, as well as the consumers, will experience.
Why is sustainability central to Ericsson’s purpose?
Sustainability is at the core of Ericsson’s strategy. It's at the core of the purpose of the company as we innovate technology for good. This is what we always talk about because we can always explore and see the opportunities that sustainability is enabling for people. It opens up opportunities for many such as enabling education along with digital and financial inclusion.
Earlier this year, Ericsson has partnered with UNICEF to be a part of the Giga initiative to connect and map schools all over the world with internet connectivity. This is just one of the concrete actions that we are doing. As we all know, education is a critical platform that can enable many nations to advance and prosper.
Another very clear and obvious area that technology can enable is financial inclusion. As part of Ericsson’s portfolio, we have the mobile wallet platform which is a truly successful story on how consumers do financial transactions in a cashless manner. In light of the pandemic, this is also becoming very essential and we see the acceleration and the adoption of mobile money going on a vertical growth trajectory in the coming years.
In a nutshell, sustainability is at the core of our strategy because we have a strong belief that the more you enable technology, the more you enable connectivity for all, and the more you open up business opportunities and educational opportunities, the benefits on the economy as a whole will be achieved.
What more can we expect from Ericsson’s commitment to sustainability, responsible business, and digital inclusion in the coming years?
The work in the sustainability area is ongoing. We still have many plans to be delivered in the coming few years, whether on the digital inclusion side, on the enabling education via connectivity side, or financial inclusion via our portfolio.
As a whole, we aim to enable a world where people have the access to information and data. Ericsson has been driving responsible business for many years. This is currently our focus. We have proudly revised our responsible business strategy and we initiated programs around compliance in the past few years.
We can see very well how the culture of responsible business has been embedded as part of the company's culture. The values of professionalism, respect, perseverance, and integrity are really transformed in the way our people conduct business and in the way we interact with our customers and our suppliers.
