Africa's largest mobile operator has embarked on a process of brand reinvention, based on convergence - a move the yellow network says will ensure dominance is maintained and even accelerated.
MTN officially unveiled its new MTN Business structure yesterday, at a media and partner event at its innovation centre, in Roodepoort. The operator shed light on the reorganised business it has been honing over the past four months, and introduced three new products and services, aimed at the SME market.
MTN SA CEO Karel Pienaar says the operator has spent a significant amount of time this year designing the "future MTN" as part of what he calls a "transformation journey to strengthen the capability of the MTN Business brand".
The drive behind MTN's new vision and strategy, says Pienaar, is four-fold. "Firstly, enterprise customers have been demanding one MTN and one interface. [Secondly] fixed mobile convergence has materialised - integration has happened - and then there are the factors such as increased opportunities for ICT solutions and infrastructure changes."
He notes that mobile infrastructure has evolved into becoming the definitive broadband vehicle in SA and Africa at large.
Streamlining operations
Zunaid Bulbulia, CFO and acting chief enterprise business officer of MTN SA, yesterday said MTN has sharpened its focus on the enterprise sector. "[We] didn't create something new, we just took what we had and brought the components together."
To this end, he says, MTN has focused on three main areas, over the past quarter particularly. "Systems, processes and people have been sorted out. Four months ago the company structure was not conducive to proposing a system to an enterprise customer.
"Then the legal structure was examined and, in the last two weeks, we have formally transferred MTN Business' assets into MTN (Pty) Ltd and now we have one organisation with one sales force. We have announced to our vendors and customers that we have merged these entities into one.
"Lastly, the focus has been on profit. Embarrassingly, we have had a very patchy record in launching products to enterprise over the past few years - and we have been seen as a follower, not as being at the same level of innovation as on the consumer side. We have spent the last four months remedying that perception."
Bulbulia says the company aims to leave a legacy that reaches beyond shareholder revenues. While this is not tantamount to the abandonment of MTN's economic practices, he says the company has been reviewing its purpose. "We haven't abandoned capitalistic principles, but the overwhelming feeling is that our purpose is bigger than just shareholder returns. We want to leave a bigger legacy of having contributed to transforming the South African and African economies."
Farhad Khan, the MTN Group's Enterprise Business division executive, adds that the operator's pricing from commoditisation has "tumbled" over the last four years. "If we were to now only provide connectivity in terms of mobile, we would be in big trouble."
Khan says MTN believes its single differentiator is that it has moved away from product, and into the solutions game.
"We have 22 operations and never before have we leveraged the capability of all the opcos [operating companies]. We want to derive value by harnessing our synergies and, within the next 12 to 18 months, connect the entire continent to the world. With our infrastructure and opcos we will get there. By the end of March, we will have a POP presence in 14 countries."
Pienaar says: "You will see a lot of us in the cloud or shared services space [in time to come]."
The new business structure is a commercial cloud offering, which MTN says it aims to launch before the end of the year.
Partnership yields products
MTN also introduced three new products that it says "are to be introduced to the market - big or small - with immediate effect".
The products - MTN SME ProPack, MTN Business Enterprise Closed User Group (ECUG) and MTN Push-to-Talk (PTT) - are being launched on the back of the network's strategic partnership with Internet service provider (ISP) Afrihost, announced last month.
"Through the partnership, MTN Business will become second in the market in terms of IPC capacity and third in terms of physical connections," says MTN.
Bulbulia says partnering with the ISP forms a critical part of broadening MTN Business's DSL offering to vendors. "It's a game changer in terms of DSL offerings in the market - where we are entering a new world, which requires innovation.
"This partnership is one critical step in demonstrating our intention to evolve as a top tier ISP and revolutionise business in Africa."
MTN's ProPack is a bundled service that MTN has put together for its enterprise customers - small businesses or entrepreneurs - that includes a concierge service, membership to the National Small Business Chamber, a loyalty programme and networking platform, among others.
Similar to closed user group products already offered by both Telkom and Cell C, MTN's ECUG is positioned as a corporate shared voice bundle, delivering "competitive voice call rates" for employee-to-employee calls and employees-to-third-party stakeholders in a closed group.
Thirdly, MTN's PTT service - launched initially in 2007, but having never really taken off - allows for instant communication between groups (of up to 25) and individuals over an existing secure and redundant MTN Business infrastructure. It offers unlimited domestic connectivity at a monthly flat rate fee. MTN says its new PTT technology allows for cheaper communication.
Victor Rakhale, GM of enterprise direct sales at MTN SA, says the company "went wrong in the past" with its positioning of PTT. He says, however, due to devices that can support two-way transceiver technology such as Tetra and mobile technology, "PTT will now take off. If you can add devices with the same GSM offering it will be different this time around".
Only the Samsung E500 currently supports this service, but MTN says the next phase will see the extension of PTT to other devices.
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