MCI INTERVIEW MCI INTERVIEW
A view from the Garrett
Garrett Johnston, group director of strategic marketing for Russian MTS, talks openly about the threats to existing carrier business models and what needs to be done to overcome them.
management level in the Russian telecommunications industry. Garrett Johnston, group director of strategic marketing for MTS, which has over 100 million subscribers in Russia and the CIS, may well be the only one. And he’s not just candid by Russian standards, he is among the most forthright operator executives in the industry at large. It’s never been fashionable for op-
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erators to openly admit to external threats, for example (they mostly pre- fer to speak in terms of challenges, opportunities and partnerships), but Johnston exhibits no such reticence. “It’s not just individual operators who are in danger,” he says, summing up a long discussion about the competitive perils of the mobile industry in 2010. “Really, as a species, our entire position in the value chain is threatened.” Johnston is speaking to MCI in
March, a few weeks after the Mobile World Congress. The themes of the show, the reflection they gave of the industry’s current state, and his direct experiences of walking the exhibition floor are still fresh in his mind, and he has plenty of ideas for how the event could be enhanced. He’s careful to say that he applauds the work of the GSMA in bringing the show together, though, and that his suggestions are only for the improvement of what he identifies as an already valuable event. MTS won a GSMA award this year, in the customer care and billing category, which may or may not have something to do with the careful diplomacy of his critique. One of the standout moments from
the show for Johnston, he says, was seeing that Steve Jobs won the Mobile Industry Personality of the Year award from the GSMA (although it was voted for by the media) but was not present to collect and acknowledge it. John- ston says he’s no Apple fanboy, but
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here can’t be many outspo- ken Irishmen with a taste for flamboyant scarves at Senior
Garrett Johnston, group director of strategic marketing, MTS
that the sense he has received from “very regular contact with a whole range of application developers all over the world” is that Jobs’ latest product, the iPad, will be “an even bigger revolution, relatively speaking, than the iPhone.” That the man who has been judged
by the industry as its Personality of the Year is not in attendance demon- strates for Johnston the show’s legacy as an event for the mobile industry, by the mobile industry. “If you look at the business model
for the telecoms industry, up to now it has been focussed on the two per cent of the customer wallet that consumers spend on telecommunications access services,” he says. “That is now chang- ing fundamentally to a focus on the 98
per cent of the customer wallet that is not spent directly on telecoms. Most of the rest of that 98 per cent will be more than adequately represented by the arrival of all of these differ- ent applications that are becoming available. “But the show is too producer-cen-
tric, too mobile industry-centric. You don’t have stands there from Proctor and Gamble, you don’t have Coca Cola, or the big banks. It’s really important that a wide cross-section of every single consumer category within that 98 per cent is invited to the show to help the industry to become the kind of platform that will make everyone successful.” Retreating to the areas of expertise that they can effectively exploit is es-
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