Delivering the O&M customers want

Salah Medawar, Chief Commercial Officer of ieng talks to TowerXchange about the company’s operational and commercial progress in Africa and the Middle East. He discusses the importance of quality O&M for ieng's customers, the company's development of 5G small cells for MNOs and how the group is seeking to address the fibre deficit in Africa. 

Of course, and it’s great to be back. ieng is a telecom infrastructure service provider that has been serving our clients for the last 17 years. We were established in Africa and then grew our footprint across the world. Today we are present in over 20 countries, mostly in Africa, but we have also expanded into the Middle East and Asia, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Philippines, India, and Myanmar.

We provide full turnkey services to enable towercos and MNOs to build or strengthen sites. We have been expanding our product offering ever since.

In addition to field services, we have two additional businesses in material supply: power equipment under the brand of Greenpole and towers under the brand of Eki.Struct. We design and manufacture all sorts of towers in Croatia and manufacture in Europe or China, based on client specification. We also provide a full green energy solutions assembled in India.

We are also diversifying into fibre projects. There are many countries where demand for fibre is high and it matches our footprint. We have delivered lots of metro fibre, fibre to the home and fibre to the tower in Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Kingdom of Saudia Arabia.

We employ roughly 4,500 people and over 90% of these are local. That’s something we pride ourselves on.

The scope of our O&M activity varies from country to country and from client to client, whether they’re a mobile network operator (MNO), towerco or OEM.

Recently, our O&M business has grown to encompass L2 telecom maintenance too. This means we can service MNOs at both L1 and L2, including active, passive fueling, security, NOC and network optimisation.

To service our clients effectively we have established our own network operations centres (NOCs) in each of our markets. These NOCs are overlooked by a Global NOC (GNOC) in Pakistan that monitors local opco NOCs with a dedicated team out of Pakistan. The Pakistan team respond to tenders for O&M contracts, work with the clients to understand their needs and establish / kick off the local country operations.

Unlike some other O&M providers we do not subcontract our O&M works. The only thing we subcontract is security because there are different ways to do security right depending on the site’s location.

Our O&M business is very important to ieng, it is secured against long-term, recurring contracts; and we have a high renewal rate.

In this way we maintain 34,000 sites globally.

Let me tell you, there has been a lot of FX fluctuations over the last two years and it has impacted us as well as the whole industry. In 2023 we faced FX difficulties in a couple of major markets that were facing big devaluations. In each of these countries we have big O&M contracts that are paid in local currency, of course.

We protect ourselves through consumer price index (CPI) escalators which reset our contracts on a yearly basis.

To mitigate these losses, we have been investing in our clients and increasing the number of sites with existing clients who are happy with our performance.

Due to the war and restrictions in the Gulf of Aden there have been supply chain challenges to deliver new sites. Transportation costs have increased as container prices react to attacks that have closed the Yemen route. Luckily for our O&M operations the picture is better. We purchase our spares and consumables locally and we pass on our supply chain risk to the vendors from which we’re purchasing.

We have recently finished developing a new solution for 5G. Indeed, ieng is now marketing a 5G Small Cells solution to MNOs that enables better coverage in dense urban areas. The deployment combines our Eki.Struct pole and Greenpole power products to create a green energy powered 5G solution which easily accommodates new tenants on a 12-15m structure.

In addition to providing space for your base station and antennas as you would expect, it is also modular and allows our clients to install a camera for security or an advertising hoarding to generate additional revenues. The product can be produced in volume and is easily replicable so it can be delivered easily and quickly.

Where we are already operational, we are talking to clients about delivering their fibre projects too. The last two years have seen demand from Chad and the DRC.

There is a huge deficit of fibre in Africa and just as there has been a lot of work required to deliver new towers in the continent, there is a long runway of growth in fibre too, and ieng is ready to help build it.

We have very good relationships in the Middle East with the largest towercos operating there. Saudi Arabia is a very important market for us where we have steadily been growing our O&M portfolio over the past two years. We are now seen by our clients as the ‘experts’ in the Western region of the Kingdom.

The next big project in Saudi Arabia is PIF’s merger between TAWAL and LATIS which will involve consolidating over 20,000 sites and bringing together Zain and stc’s networks. That may be followed by incorporating Mobily’s network too.

With TASC Towers, we concentrate on supplying towers and power equipment to their existing markets. We are ready and excited to continue partnering with them in their new markets’ expansions through their recent acquisitions.

Just like in Africa, we are confident in our continued growth in the Middle East and North Africa.