Ooredoo has updated its investors and analysts on the business’ financial and strategic progress as part of its transparent investor relations programme during its annual Capital Markets Day held in Doha, Qatar recently.

More than 70 participants attended the event, where Dr Nasser Marafih, Ooredoo’s group chief executive officer, led presentations by the heads of Ooredoo’s finance, strategy and business-to-business (B2B) teams as well as the senior management of Ooredoo Qatar and Ooredoo Algeria, said a statement.

The management presentations provided updates on how Ooredoo performed against its Drive Strategy which is based on three core areas of focus: leading on customer experience; strengthening foundations; and accelerating growth.

“Ooredoo has made good progress against the objectives of the Drive Strategy.  Ooredoo now has more than 114 million customers globally and its brand is increasingly the preferred communications brand in many of our markets following the investment we have made in creating and rolling out a global brand,” said Dr Marafih.

“The Ooredoo brand now operates in seven of Ooredoo’s markets and its brand equity is now independently valued at $1.7 billion.  We have driven broadband growth across our markets, encouraged by the network upgrades we have made over the past year, which means Ooredoo typically offers high quality networks in its respective markets,” he said.

“Ooredoo now has 4G in five out of its nine markets, which is driving strong data revenue growth; data revenue is now 30 per cent of total group revenue.  We are generating significant cost synergies across the Group through global efficiency programmes, as well as benefiting from investing in standardised technologies such as U900 and pursuing infrastructure sharing agreements,” Dr Marafih said.

“New revenue opportunities are being generated through initiatives such as our global B2B business which targets the communication needs of our business customers.  As much as $1.3 billion of B2B revenue was generated in 2014 with a 25 per cent increase in customer growth.  Our e-commerce strategy with Rocket Internet is also making good progress with initial investments in Asia.”

“The shift to a digital world opens up significant opportunities for Ooredoo.  Our customers demand increasingly ubiquitous access to data-based services delivered by world leading, super-fast networks.   Our discussions today with our investors and analysts demonstrated how we are successfully progressing against our strategy, which positions Ooredoo at the heart of a digital world, able to capture the value of a global, converging communications market.” - TradeArabia News Service