Amr Shady, CEO of TA Telecom, on S for Africa and the Middle East


By Jonathan Sim I


BM CEO Ginny Rometty recently projected that in 2015 an increased proportion of Big Blue’s revenues would come from Africa and that would continue to grow in the future. It was a timely reminder of the


potential of the continent for growth. What it also should have reminded us is that with the potential for growth comes the potential for local entrepreneurship. Indeed, the support of entrepreneurship will provide much of the growth IBM will need in order to deliver and please investors and analysts on Wall Street.


Other big firms including Baidu, Google, Microsoft and Orange have been making similar overtures and investments. But it would be a mistake to assume that Africa was not already Entrepreneur Country. There are many home- grown entrepreneurs now blazing a trail in the technology business throughout the continent.


One such entrepreneur is Amr Shady. Shady


is the chief executive officer of TA Telecom, the value-added telecommunications services company he co-founded at the age of just 23 after eschewing a long-term career in his family’s electrical contracting business in favour of developing his own firm. He has since built the business into one of the most profitable and fastest-growing companies in the Middle East and Africa, serving five million end-users across the region. It has also earned his company a slot on the Arabia Fast Growth 500 and the North Africa Fast Growth 50, resulting in Shady being asked to become a member of the Endeavor Global investment network, after being selected as one of 604 high-impact entrepreneurs from a pool of almost 29,000 applicants in emerging markets.


Shady is now at the helm of one of the “Five ‘Young World’ Tech Innovators to Watch” in 2011, according to Internet Evolution. And Egyptians might have known they had a high-potential individual amongst them, when Shady enrolled at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada at the age of 16. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering right after his 21st birthday, and upon graduating, returned home to take the position of project manager at IBLEC, a construction contracting firm founded by his father in the 1970s.


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Shady’s prodigious progress continued and by the age of 21 he was managing the company’s Egyptian operations, enabling him to learn and refine skills not often mastered by entrepreneurs until long after their initial business is established. By the time he left IBLEC in 2000 he’d learned the administrative knowledge needed for supervising complex projects, coordinating large teams and working effectively with a variety of people originating from divergent backgrounds. Most notably he used this knowledge to formulate his approach to building successful businesses which he describes as `systematising the innovation process. `


All of which would serve him well as he embarked upon his entrepreneurial journey.


Seeing the


potential for mobile marketing in 2000, Shady launched Mobise, the first mobile marketing agency in the Middle East, and a platform that enabled mobile marketing - an invention that would serve as the basis for TA Telecom’s core value- added services offering, developing customised content platforms for mobile operators in the Middle East and Africa.


The success of his business has been based on the early identification of a growing opportunity. As the new century unfolded, mobile operators would soon be under pressure to expand their customers bases and increase the average revenue per user (ARPU) by protecting and expanding profitable new segments, particularly through providing compelling consumer data services. Shady’s entrepreneurial insight was that they would have difficulty in doing this alone and that he could help. Thirteen years later and based in Cairo, he now manages TA Telecom operations in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Afghanistan and Kenya.


Most Europeans need reminding that the majority of the world’s handsets in use are still basic phones and feature phones. But even in emerging markets there is a rapid shift towards the use of smartphones, other smart devices and interaction with social media with the increasingly dominant data-consuming use to which these devices are put. In Shady’s region, the ‘Arab Spring’ too has led to social and political changes that have hugely increased the demand for information and news services.


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