Camusat is an established and trusted partner of towercos and MNOs and towercos on five continents. Able to leverage scale to selectively provide project finance and to secure volume discounts on procurement, Camusat deploys managed services for passive and active infrastructure, power, fiber and microwave transmission. Camusat offers the perfect balance of global scale and local expertise, capable of completing projects on time and on budget in some of the most logistically challenging developing markets.
TowerXchange: Please reintroduce the capabilities and footprint of Camusat for readers not familiar with your company.
Sebastien Martin, COO, Africa, Camusat:
Camusat is an established provider specialised of Turnkey Infrastructure and Managed Services with offices on five continents and 35 countries including Benin, Botswana, Cameroon, Central African Republic, DRC, Guinea Conakry, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Morocco, Niger, Senegal, Tanzania, Togo and Uganda. We currently have 2,109 staff, of whom 1,069 are in Africa, where we are building around 500 towers per year. We also recently secured a contract to rollout 500 towers for Apollo Towers in Myanmar.
Our group is focused on five business lines.
The first one is on telecom site and infrastructure construction, from site acquisition, to civil works, tower construction, camouflage and rapid deployment sites.
We also offer power and renewable energy solutions – we provide pure photovoltaic power supply systems, batteries and a new genset hybrid solution, called e.power by Camusat.
Our third business line is the installation and commissioning of active equipment – drive testing RF, microwave transmission, radio network planning and optimisation, indoor planning and optimisation but also network performance analysis and audits and benchmarking.
Our fourth business line is fiber optics. This is almost new for Camusat in Africa but we’re already delivering a lot of big contracts for FTTH – we provide design, deployment engineering, right of way management, supply of materials and build of physical infrastructure for outside plant, FTTH, FTTB access networks and fiber optics backbones routes.
Our fifth business line is managed services and maintenance – one of our biggest activities since the telecom industry has increasingly favored outsourcing. We provide an innovative package of tools and platforms for network management, site control and supervision, preventive and corrective maintenance, and have also developed a monitoring system to manage passive infrastructure.
We recently established a global NOC in Romania from which we complete the full end to end managed services from field maintenance to monitoring.
Camusat remains technology agnostic – we will offer to implement our own solutions, but if the customer wants third party technology we can integrate it.
TowerXchange: Camusat are renowned for your ability to build and maintain towers in remote areas - what are the critical success factors in managing cell sites in markets with poor transport infrastructure?
Sebastien Martin, COO, Africa, Camusat:
Camusat has many years of experience in building and maintaining towers in critical areas lacking transportation capabilities.
Working in logistically challenging markets requires good project management and relationship management. Our capabilities in the field come from working with and employing local people – they know how to handle logistical problems in their own country.
The impact of challenging transport infrastructure is most important when you have a new site build. Preparation of logistics is the most important thing you need to handle; it doesn’t matter if it takes ten minutes or ten hours to reach the tower, what is important is co-ordinating the project so all the components come together at once, which means managing importation, lead times, inland logistics and the workforce to ensure sites can be delivered on time and safely.
TowerXchange: How do you balance the operational capability and capacity of Camusat with the need to deliver lean, efficient services in price sensitive markets?
Sebastien Martin, COO, Africa, Camusat:
Our project department work hard on material supply and sourcing at group level to get better solutions at better prices worldwide. Recently we decided to manufacture our towers outside Europe to get better prices, but we still use the same standards and manage quality.
It is also critical that we deliver our services by working with local people. For example of 1,000 Camusat people in Africa, just 25 are expats.
One of the important factors when working with the towerco business is to be able to provide quantity of service. The prices towercos will pay are very low, so you need volume. For example, if you get only get a field maintenance contract for 100 sites, you often will find that you lose money, but to maintain 300-400 sites you don’t have to treble your resources so you can be more efficient and build sustainable business.
TowerXchange: What are the implications and opportunities for managed service providers arising from the recent wave of tower transactions in SSA?
Sebastien Martin, COO, Africa, Camusat:
The entry of independent towercos into developing markets is a very important change for Camusat because they have become our main customers. Tower transactions represent important opportunities for us to secure long term field maintenance contracts with towercos, and secure the business.
TowerXchange: How do Camusat win contracts with towercos?
Sebastien Martin, COO, Africa, Camusat:
We maintain relationships with towercos at group level. We work with the towercos on pre-sale site audits before the transaction is completed, so we already know the assets when we bid for the upgrade and maintenance contracts, and the towerco management team already knows Camusat.
As we are able to offer towercos a solution in many countries, we can also leverage group level prices. While we have local expertise, Camusat is not just a local subcontractor, but also a group subcontractor. Working with us, the towercos know we can give them all the power to succeed – not only a focus on one or few countries, but across their entire footprint.
TowerXchange: Finally, please sum up what differentiates Camusat from other managed service providers.
Sebastien Martin, COO, Africa, Camusat:
Camusat is becoming an international group with a very efficient finance solution and organisational structure. This gives us the ability to develop major projects in existing or new countries in a very short time.
Our global scale means Camusat also has the capability to selectively provide project finance.
And from a technical point of view, we provide end to end solutions for towercos and MNOs, from site acquisition to managed services and our global NOC.
