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Global Entrepreneurship


These developments have the potential to condition the relationship between subscribers more and more, through their phone and the services they consume.


Overall, mobile operators


will make more money from data than from voice by 2018, according to the GSMA, with Kenya - one of Africa’s most connected countries - hitting the target in 2016. In such an environment, where markets are growing rapidly, the stakes are high.


In this environment, demand for TA Telecom’s platforms and managed services has continued to increase as mobile operators face potential revenue loss through subscribers going direct for services to over-the-top (OTT) application providers, particularly as smartphone penetration increases.


So the stakes are high as Africa and the Middle East continue to develop. Given the increasing scale of mobile networks, small changes in individual average revenue per user (ARPU) magnified across a mobile network can result in the gain or loss of hundreds of millions of dollars. This certainly enables Shady to get the mobile networks’ attention.


Even more importantly, the strategic impact, market value and ability of operators to charge profitable rates for their data services decline if they become simply `fat, dumb pipes.’ This is a nightmare trend that mobile operators are keen to slow, stop or reverse and Shady argues that achieving this requires better knowledge of customer needs. This is something which mobile operators have been slow to appreciate but that Shady delivers using social media data and analytical techniques combined with the delivery of managed services. In this respect, the company’s key product is Buzz!, the first service delivery platform fine- tuned for mobile operators with prepaid content subscription services, which continue to drive the company’s success.


This and other services quickly provide operators the ability to flexibly deploy, enhance and monetise applications and value-added services. Even providing basic data services around news, sport and religious matters enhances the customer experience and develops revenue streams that conventional operators would otherwise find to be inexorably eroded. As such, Shady provides the opportunity for mobile operators to quickly and effectively offer services from alerts, push content to information feeds delivered via SMS.


Even the most simple of these services identifies touch points and engages with mobile network subscribers’ interests - whether they use basic, feature or smartphones, or are post-paid or pre-paid - and allow a relationship between the mobile operator and its subscribers to develop. In doing so,


28 entrepreneurcountry


TA Telecom allows mobile operators to capture a substantial part of the value created by the entry of OTT providers into the MEA market.


The trump card that TA Telecom holds over its US or European headquartered competitors, though, is that it knows the unique customer realities and barriers for service adoption, as well as the economic, political and cultural conditions that exist in MEA. This enables mobile operators to better understand and monetise their customers’ needs. And that keeps the mobile operators coming back for more.


Despite the round-the-clock challenges of running fast- growth businesses, like many entrepreneurs Shady also finds the time and energy to devote to giving back to his community, promoting entrepreneurship among students and recent graduates by serving as a mentor for Endeavor Egypt, Flat6Labs and the Lift-Off Initiative. He also makes time to be involved with students at Cairo University.


It’s that belief that mobile technology can and should serve as a platform to benefit local communities that saw him form his third venture. He established Megakheir (which translates as ‘Mega Goodness’) in 2010, as the first mobile donation brand in the region, raising funds to provide meals and support to organisations that include the Egyptian Food Bank and the Somalia relief effort in 2011. Megakheir’s unique model involves it partnering with NGOs to identify specific needs and then develop products and apps that are provided free to the NGO but sold throughout the world, donating a percentage of the proceeds back to the partner organization.


At just 37, Shady still sees boundless opportunities as connectivity in Africa and the Middle East further increases. The trick, he says, ‘is to define something that people want and then find a better way to deliver it to them.’


The Business District in Cairo, Egypt


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