With more than ten years of experience in the African, Asian and, more recently, Latin American telecom tower field, Eki.Struct is a leading design and engineering company pushing the boundaries of innovation. Thanks to its unique, fresh approach to design, the firm is now able to offer towers with no foundations as well as scalable single tenant towers upgradable up to four tenants in a single day.
In this interview, the company’s CEO Rabih Najjar discusses with TowerXchange Eki.Struct’s unique know-how, total cost of ownership (TCO) driven approach and latest projects.
TowerXchange: Please introduce yourself and Eki.Struct to our readers.
Rabih Najjar, CEO, Eki.Struct:
I am the CEO of Eki.Struct, a leading tower designer and manufacturer. To date, we supply towers in 27 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Eki.Struct is an approved supplier to major towercos and operators including MTN Group, IHS Group, American Tower, Ooredoo, Telxius, Apollo Towers, Helios and Irrawaddy Green Towers, Telenor, OTA Djezzy, Mobilis, among others.
Our products include both conventional towers as well as many innovative solutions in response to the growing demand for new site typologies and low cost solutions.
Eki.Struct takes advantage of its full-fledged design and engineering centre based in Europe. And we are lucky to work with a solid team of engineers who have designed over 140 certified tower types across three continents. As you can imagine, our library of tower options is quite considerable. The company offers a wide portfolio of products, conventional and innovative and services including tower audit and reinforcement services with local setup in Africa and Asia. The audit service is centralized in Europe with technical groups travelling to Opcos for extensive trainings, supervision, maintenance and certification.
Our products have been audited and approved by some of the top audit firms including Bureau Veritas, YCDC, Socotec and SERC India. I am proud to say we have a 100% success rate when it comes to audit and certification for conventional and Rapid Deployment units.
TowerXchange: What makes Eki.Struct different from other tower suppliers?
Rabih Najjar, CEO, Eki.Struct:
One of our core strengths lies in Eki.Struct’s design methodology. In fact, while we do utilize software which we have designed to fit our methodology, we opt for out-of-the-box solutions able to defy conventions and we rely on our designers to bring to the table flexible options, in line with our clients’ requirements and with our core values of efficiency, simplicity and innovation.
We prefer not to be locked and limited by the experience and know-how of a given piece of software available in the market and widely used by competition. And this degree of flexibility has definitely contributed to our international success.
The fact that we are part of a large group of companies is an added value which helps us to exchange insights with various professionals while keeping intact our identity and specialization. Those learnings are constantly factored in in our designs to achieve higher efficiency.
We work with a TCO approach to each project and don’t take on any work with a flat, standardized point of view. We work with all the cost components in mind, including FOB cost which is the price of the product at source, the effect of innovation on the TCO from a design, manufacturing, installation and maintenance standpoint. We try and reduce the cost of each and every component of the process to offer the maximum level of savings to our customers. In addition we also highlight the indirect impact of our innovation products such as Quick Site on the client’s operation, namely project management and maintenance.
At Eki.Struct we are extremely committed to finding the best solution for each project. And this requires extensive TCO analyses, as well as innovation and efficiency tests during the rollout and the life of the tower.
I would say that all clients look for the same: the most efficient product at the lowest price! We welcome every challenge that allows us to show some of our financial and technical capabilities.
TowerXchange: What are some of the innovative types of towers that are being deployed by Eki.Struct?
Rabih Najjar, CEO, Eki.Struct:
Nowadays, rural rollouts is one of the hottest subjects, and we are working on various projects including for MTN alongside i-engineering.
In order to work successfully on rural projects, we’ve been focused on creating a product that gets Eki.Struct product along with power, installation and maintenance very close to the target price per tower that towercos have set (US$40,000) for a rural site. That obviously depends on the height of the tower but I am proud to say that we are extremely close to that figure. Additionally, we are working with different clients on our high efficiency packages which include tower and power as well as installation and maintenance services.
These efficient packages have been in demand in various markets in Africa and Asia. One example I would call attention is Myanmar, where the focus is now shifting to rural coverage projects after a very fast urban rollout over the past few years.
At Eki.Struct, we’ve been offering innovative packages able to change and improve the core financial model of towercos.
Among them, our upgradable Multi-Tenant modular, it is a single tenant tower upgradable to a two, three or four-tenant tower in one single day. It is definitely one of the top innovations we bring to the table. In fact, thanks to this product, we are allowing towercos to deploy towers with less initial capex, knowing that they can upgrade them to multiple tenants in just a few hours.
This is a groundbreaking change in the way towercos plan their investments and projects as it allows them to calibrate their initial financial commitment to a single tenant structure without losing the capability and flexibility to easily upgrade.
In fact, towercos will save 15% to 20% on capex when deploying a single tenant tower and only pay the additional fee of 15% when upgrading to multiple tenants. If the client has two tenants on the tower then saving will be around 8%. This will grant them considerable savings and will have a huge impact on their operational model! It will also change the way clients prepare their tower specifications taking assumptions with a lot of safety that will impact cost savings in the future. This solution touches on the core business model of a tower company.
To date, Eki.Struct is already collaboration with this solution to two major towercos, in both Africa and Asia, and we look forward to working with more clients on this.
Other site typologies and reduced costs targets that are in demand these days, we offer our 60 degrees angular tower which isn’t a very common type of structure from a production point of view. The angular tower is true to the exact design that we create and allows for optimized maintenance costs also thanks to the lower quantity of bolts and nuts required. By opting for this solution, towercos and MNOs can obtain longer shelf life of the tower as well as ensure lower maintenance requirements.
TowerXchange: How can Eki.Struct guarantee the savings that are estimated on paper in real life?
Rabih Najjar, CEO, Eki.Struct:
Whenever we receive a request for proposal, we analyse the specific market conditions of the project. That includes the logistics involved, the topographical category of the location, average wind speed et cetera. Utilising our TCO model, we then choose the most suitable product. This product can be a mix of two innovative solutions such as Quick Site QS and Multi-Tenant, to achieve clients initial budget.
We test what we think can be innovative on paper by implementing it in specific environments and comparing its performance with our initial assumptions and calculations. I am proud to say that we’ve been able to validate our initial TCO estimates in most of our deployments.
Our rapid deployment sites Quick Site (QS) and Fast Mast (FM) have little to no foundations. Foundations are the bottleneck of most deployments and our customers can enjoy considerable benefits by having them removed. In fact, a rollout will cost less and also take less time. There will also be less quality tests needed.
At Eki.Struct, we are flipping the equation and allowing rapid deployments to cost lower than standard deployments. And this is mostly thanks to our 24-piece base structure which takes a couple of hours to put together compared to the three weeks required to create the foundations of a standard tower. Bear in mind that I am not referring to a quick deployment utilized as a temporary solution but as a permanent site!
Our clients are usually impressed by our solutions as they enable great changes to their projects. Removing the foundations isn’t only reducing the time needed to install a tower but also the financial risk of a project. In fact, it eliminates much of the risk of currency fluctuation since the RDU QS tower with no foundation will be purchased just days after the resources have been allocated in line with initial budget. Variation orders and negative impact of currency exchange months after budget are from the past.
