In an exclusive for Telecom Review, du Chief Commercial Officer Karim Benkirane elaborates on the context of how they, as a leading digital telco, are enabling continual transformation and helping partners and organizations to maximize the value of digital strategies. Also, he shed light on how to develop digital skills among the new generation.
Leading up to the new year we are in, can you share the main highlights of du in 2022? How would you describe the company’s performance over the past few years in the face of all the innovations?
du this year performed really well with double-digit growth, and we are really proud of our performance and our financial results. We definitely managed to increase our performance in the consumer part, in the enterprise part, in fixed and in mobiles. We are really happy with our performance across all the lines and across all the segments in the market today.
We believe in putting the customer at the center of our strategy and making sure to keep things simple, and more digital — a one-click type of approach. This is to make things better and simpler for our customers, which will result to positive outcomes.
Aiming to be a leading digital telco, how do you plan to maximize opportunities to connect, inspire and reward?
Leading a digital telco is our vision; to enable that, we are trying to redesign our IT ecosystem. We are going through a massive transformation, making sure that our legacy systems are replaced and making this opportunity more of a business transformation than an IT transformation. Firstly, we're trying to build a new IT ecosystem to deliver our vision. Secondly, we are working on how to make sure that our processes, our governance and our way of operating are enabling us to succeed further in our digital innovation journey. And with all the business models, we are trying to innovate and make sure that the digital customer experience is the main objective for the outcome. This is going to be a long journey, but I have no doubt in the successful outcomes and key learnings that we will realise along the way.
As you are always working towards something new, what are the focus goals of du in 2023?
2023 is going to be the continuity of our business strategy to deliver the vision of being the leading digital telco. We are going to migrate our customers step by step into the new IT ecosystem to offer better capabilities and a better experience. We believe that by planning and partnering with different vendors, we can deliver the best experience.
We will continue with the same focus on how to win in our fixed markets and how to deliver better growth and better performance to our stakeholders.
From your perspective, how important is developing digital skills among the new generation, and how is this manifested in du’s corporate strategy?
It's all about people. The digital transformation journey will be difficult to achieve, but we have the talent and the digital skills to succeed. Also, we are working really hard on our people to upskill and make sure that they are up to speed and embrace our digital transformation. Moreover, we are hiring new skills to deliver our vision, and we are providing our human resources and our people department with all the tools and the framework to make sure that we can upscale and that we can also attract digital talents to Dubai and to du.