At GITEX GLOBAL, Telecom Review conducted an exclusive interview with Alex Lee, Managing Director, China Mobile International Middle East (CMI Middle East). He shared the value of their successful collaboration, outlook in the region’s data centre sector, enhanced offerings, and the importance of participating in this year’s tech show.
There have been several notable collaborations and projects for CMI in the region this year. How did this make a positive impact and support the growth of the company’s operations?
All these collaborations strengthen the ecosystem that we’re trying to build here. One of the core strengths of China Mobile International is the rich infrastructure. But because of the needs and demands of the market, we need to be able to integrate our partners, and serve as a complete system integrator to position ourselves as a one-stop shop. As we strengthen our ability to do that, and we strengthen our ecosystem, this brings in more opportunities, contributing to the revenue, both internally and externally. The marketing of this approach also leads to other possible prospects.
As CMI expands and builds high-tier data centers, what is your outlook on the data centre sector in the Middle East? How will CMI maintain its significant role in this industry?
As you rightfully said, China Mobile International has been investing data centers in various strategic locations. Over here, we can definitely see a huge potential in Middle East Region. When you look at GITEX alone, there’s a lot of AI-related initiatives, which would require more intensive cloud computing. This is an opportunity for data centers.
CMI is known for delivering the best global carrier enterprise services. What are your new or enhanced offerings that will benefit both carriers and enterprises sustainably?
Firstly, we’re trying to shift from traditionally selling data center colocation space to packaging the hardware and providing a computing cloud as a service. Secondly, we see the cost of a lot of capability and experience with 5G smart solutions. CMI supports 5G toB innovation to the market, for both carriers and enterprises. Through this, they can be able to learn from CMI’s experience, to be able to enhance 5G toB offerings. IoT is also something that we are trying to complete, focusing on smart mining, smart industrial parks, smart port and smart factories. We believe all of these are requirements of the market but we need a complete solution to provide it today.
What is CMI showcasing in GITEX this year? And how will this impact the company’s targets for the rest of 2023 and beyond?
If you see our GITEX stand this year, it’s bigger than last year. Every year, we think about how we can fully demonstrate our solutions and abilities. For us, we find that the ecosystem is very important. In our stand, we showcase the capabilities of the best practice we collaborate closely with our partners . At the same time, it shows our mission of being a world-class information services and sci-tech innovation enterprise. We can use this to help companies transform digitally. Not only does this help us and our products, but our ecosystem. GITEX is a great place to showcase our capability and to obviously do marketing. But more importantly, it enables our existing customers to be more visible. Again, this brings on a lot of opportunities for the coming year and next years. Even some partners, who we work with, have not really been exposed to such a showcase so we're trying to bring them here to see what we're doing and join us.
