Telecom Operators

Telecom Egypt announced its 2021 guidance, in line with three main KPIs: Mid-to-high single digit revenue growth, EBITDA margin in the early thirties and in-service CapEx-to-sales ratio in the late twenties, excluding spectrum.
Adel Hamed, managing director and chief executive officer, commented, “Our 2021 guidance reflects our expectations of another year of outstanding operational and financial performance, which will continue to support the company in its vision of becoming the leading ICT provider in the market, and transforming Egypt into a premium digital hub.

Vodafone announced that its discussions with Saudi Telecom Company (stc) regarding the sale of Vodafone’s 55% shareholding in Vodafone Egypt have been terminated after a series of missed deadlines to complete the deal.

Etisalat Digital and First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) announced a strategic partnership to deploy a cloud-based IoT Smart Building solution, providing FAB ‘anytime anywhere’ access and ease of operations across its entire portfolio.

stc Group said that it intends to establish a premier digital hub for the MENA region, in cooperation with regional and international partners. This is expected to create an ecosystem of advanced technology services that will establish Saudi Arabia as a leading business hub in the region, and meet the expected future growth in services and investments in the ICT sector. This will be achieved by taking advantage of the Kingdom's strategic location at the intersection of three continents, and promoting investment in international connectivity services and data centers to leverage the Group's various assets, services, and advanced technologies. A number of next generation multi-terabit cables are currently in the planning stages to meet the very high cloud and content demands predicted in the future, and the first of those to come to the region will land with stc.

In presence of HRH prince Mohammed bin Khaled Abdulla Al-Faisal, stc has announced launching 3 Mega Data Centers in Riyadh, Jeddah and Al-Madina, with SAR 1 billion investment. They aim to host telecommunications equipment and digital cloud infrastructure, offering higher availability, more flexibility and faster time to the customer. stc adopted Next Generation build technology through modular and prefabricated solutions, affirming business continuity and service uptime. It also enables stc to optimize future expansions with Grow-On-Demand technology and Quick-To-Market solutions.

Etisalat Group has announced the appointment of Hatem Dowidar as CEO. Dowidar has been acting CEO since May 2020.

stc in collaboration with its partners stc Solutions and Altiostar, becomes the first operator in the MENA region to run live ORAN session’s. ORAN is a revolutionary technology that promises to change the landscape of wireless service offering. ORAN runs on virtualized and modular software cloud-based technologies, delivering solutions in a quick and efficient manner.

Comviva, the global leader in mobility solutions announced its strategic partnership with Ooredoo Kuwait. As part of this data science and managed CVM engagement, Comviva will support Ooredoo Kuwait deliver contextual customer campaigns with MobiLytix™ Real Time Marketing, a machine learning driven digital omni-channel marketing automation platform. The solution uses advanced analytics and leading real-time technology that enables telecom operators to fully leverage “micro moments” of engagement with their customers to build customer life-time value. The machine learning models improve decisioning quality to drive customer experience, reduce churn and boost the operator’s revenue.

stc announced another milestone in its 5G commercial network development, demonstrating New Radio (NR) with 8 carrier aggregation (CA) using Nokia advanced mmWave technology and on a single Qualcomm 5G chipset. The company established the 5G Non-standalone (NSA) data call by aggregating 8CC x100MHz on mmWave spectrum (26Ghz) on live network conditions in Makkah City.

Etisalat today announced that Smiles launched the UAE’s first ever Rewards Exchange powered by blockchain, facilitating fast, seamless and secure points exchange from a single platform to enhance customer experience.