customer analytics, agility, and corporate partnerships · the research and writing of this case...

Customer Analytics, Agility, and Corporate Partnerships:How TA Telecom Expanded Beyond Egypt

May 2016

How TA Telecom Expanded | 2

AcknowledgementsThe research and writing of this case study was carried out by Iliana Montauk.

Jamil Wyne, provided valuable guidance for structuring and implementing this publication. Heba Gamal, former Managing Director of Endeavor Egypt and Amr Shady, Founder and Executive Chairman of TA Telecom also provided important in-sights and feedback throughout the study. Teeb Assaf, William Altman, and Tarren Peterson from the Wamda Research Lab edited this case study.


ContextSince the 1960s, employment in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has been concentrated largely in the public and informal sectors.1 The public sector has often been inefficient in these countries, hiring five times as many staff as is needed in order to shield citizens from high unemployment rates. Additionally, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has found that higher levels of public sector employment are correlated with low employment levels in the private sector and not higher levels of total employment.2 At the other end of the employment spectrum is the informal sector that is primarily comprised of small family businesses providing subsistence living that does not substantially contribute to economic development.3

MENA countries are now facing an acute unemployment crisis that is likely to worsen in the next decades due to the fact that many young people will be entering the workforce in the coming years.4 One possible solution to this crisis, entrepreneurship, is receiving increased interest and investment, prompting some governments to streamline regulations to make it easier for the private sector to establish new companies in the hope of creating jobs. Local stakeholders and international players have also begun to promote entrepreneurship, founding over 100 new incubators, investment funds, startup competitions, and other related initiatives.5 Consequently, new enterprises and startups are blossoming in the region.

While it has become easier for individuals to start companies, growing or scaling these new ventures remains a monumental challenge. In a Wamda Research Lab study of over 170 entrepreneurship experts in MENA, the majority said that the most challenging phase for entrepreneurs is scaling – more than starting up, piloting, or even sustaining their company.6 Consequently, two fundamental questions about scaling in MENA need to be answered.

How can enterprises in the region expand beyond the original countries in which they were founded? How can they grow or scale to increase their revenue, their impact, and the number of people they employ? Enterprises will need to come up with answers to these questions in order to achieve their business goals. If entrepreneurs unlock these critical answers, they will also contribute meaningfully to the region’s capacity to employ the greatest number of workers possible.

While scaling an enterprise poses challenges for entrepreneurs in any part of the world, common themes have emerged regarding the barriers specific to growing enterprises in MENA. Yet, there is a paucity of research on the topic of scaling in MENA.7 As entrepreneurs, investors, and policy makers begin to tackle the issue of scale, additional insight is needed to guide their efforts.

1 The MENA region has the highest global ratio of public sector to private sector employees, with the government providing nearly one third of total employment – twice the world average. Government wages in the MENA region account for 9.8% of GDP. This is the highest rate worldwide, followed by Africa’s 6.7% (as compared to 4.5% in OECD countries). This is according to World Bank data from the 1990s. See Ibrahim Saif and Joulan Abdul Khalek, “Youth in the Middle East and the Job Market,” Carnegie Middle East Center, October 27, 2011. The informal sector represents nearly two thirds of total employment in poorer countries. Total government and informal sector employment figures are from “Growth, Employment, and Decent Work in the Arab Region: An Overview” (page 9), 2008 and After the Spring: Economic Transitions in the Arab World, chapter 2. The data are from 2004. The global average does not include China 2 M. Annuziata and R Rostom, Mapping the Future of Work in MENAT, GE 20143 Nasr, Sahar; Pearce, Douglas. Middle East and North Africa Region - SMEs for job creation in the Arab world, World Bank, 20124 About 60% of MENA residents are below the age of 30. The youth unemployment rate is 25%.5 J. Wyne (2014), “The Next Step: Breaking the Barriers to Scale for MENA’s Entrepreneurs”, Wamda Research Lab.6 J. Wyne (2014), “The Next Step: Breaking the Barriers to Scale for MENA’s Entrepreneurs”, Wamda Research Lab. Sixty percent of respondents said that scaling was the most challenging phase for entrepreneurs in MENA.7 Daniel Isenberg, “Focus Entrepreneurship Policy on Scale-Up, Not Start-Up,” Harvard Business Review blog, November, 2012. Available at http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/11/focus-entrepreneurship-policy. Viewed on September 18, 2013.


IntroductionStarting in Egypt in 2000 as a mobile advertising provider, the mobile technology and software company TA Telecom had a small client base. In 2001 they pivoted into ‘value-added services’ (VAS). Between 2006 and 2013 they grew rapidly, and during that time, in 2012, they began developing mobile applications, and ventured into Big Data and predictive analytics.

As of writing, its products continue to reach approximately 10 million people in 10 different countries (Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Libya, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan) and the company is preparing to enter into Tanzania and Cote D’Ivoire.

Company size quadrupled between 2006 and 2008 and then more than doubled between 2011 and 2014.

Staff size has increased much less than revenue, signaling that TA Telecom is producing value more efficiently: the company had about 15 employees in 2006 and 65 in 2015.

As for revenue this grew 560% in five years (2009-2014), ranking on Deloitte’s Fast 500 EMEA and Fast 50 Africa – a prestigious list of fastest growing technology companies.

Since it operates in the rapidly-changing technology industry, TATelecom will need to show that it can develop new products orservices to prove that its success will last long-term.

This case study aims to shed light on the strategies TA Telecom used to grow between 2000 and 2013. We focus on four factors that enabled the company to scale quickly:

1 Be agile in response to market trends

2 Use data to understand your customer and drive your innovation

3 Find corporate clients who can facilitate your expansion into new markets

4 Develop talent recruitment and retention into a science

These strategies have been key to TA Telecom’s achievements during the past 15 years. Though other companies in the region may find other ways of addressing similar challenges based on their unique circumstances, TA Telecom’s experience with these themes provides useful insight that may be replicable in other contexts.

8 TA Telecom was started in 1999. It was officially registered in 2000.9 Value-added services are phone services that users can receive in addition to their core voice calls (e.g., ring back tones, daily news summaries that are automatically sent to users by SMS, etc.)


Company Overview

FoundersAmr ShadyMohamed Wafik (until 2010)

Industry: Mobile technology

Products & Services:Data analytics, mobile applications, value-added services (VAS), mobile advertising, and mobile donations

Year founded:

2000

Headquarters: Cairo (Egypt)

Totalemployees

65Other physical locations:Lagos (Nigeria) and Nairobi(Kenya, sales office)Footprint: Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, and Nigeria

Investors:None

Competitors: Onmobile; Comviva; IMImobile

In 2012, the company began developing mobile applications, and ventured into big data and predictive analytics. TA Telecom is currently headquartered in Cairo, but has a significant presence in multiple countries across the MENA region as well as Sub-Saharan Africa, namely Nigeria and Kenya.

Founder and Executive Chairman Amr Shady is an Endeavor entrepreneur and also serves on the board of Endeavor Egypt.


Timeline of key developments for TA Telecom:

Company founded in Egypt asa mobile ad agency

Begins producing and aggregating content for telecom companies. Its clients are Vodafone, Mobinil, and Etisalat.

Entered UAE market

Launches BUZZ!, a VAS platform which becomes its cash cow

Entered Nigeria and Afghanistan markets

Expands to Afghanistan and Nigeria when Etisalat enters those markets

Opened East African sales office in Nairobi

Opened West African sales office in Casablanca, MoroccoInvented Reveel, a data analytic tool that measures the performance subscription-based services and predicts revenue growthLaunched Reveel Inc. in Silicon Valley

2000

2001

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2012

2014

Produces first VAS application, a game for soccer fans in Cairo. Its main client is Vodafone.


Strategy one:Be agile in response to market trends

Amr Shady founded TA Telecom (formerly 3alSMS) in 2000 with one of his close friends. They had noticed the rise of mobile phones in Egypt and aimed to create a mobile advertising solution that would allow markets to reach their audiences via text messages. In 2001, Shady and his co-founders sponsored a carnival at the American University in Cairo (AUC) so that they could set up a booth and collect students’ phone numbers. Their goal was to populate their database with contact information for people their advertising clients would want to access. At the carnival, they were approached by the marketing director of Vodafone. Curious about their company, he asked them to visit his office the following week to explore partnership opportunities.

TA Telecom decided to use the opportunity to pitch an idea that would use VAS to engage with soccer fans. Shady and his team believed sports fans would be an ideal target market. During their meeting, they pitched the idea: Vodafone’s customers would pay for the value-added service, receive text messages with trivia questions, and gain points by answering them correctly. Hatem Dowidar, then the Marketing Director of Vodafone, was intrigued by the proposition and signed a partnership with TA Telecom. This transition brought on a significant challenge: Shady and his team were entering a new line of products in which they had no expertise. “We were shocked when we walked out of the Vodafone office,” says Shady. “We had had the idea, but we didn’t think Vodafone might actually sign up for it. After signing the deal, we realized we had to figure out how to execute our idea.” Shady and his team quickly designed the tool, outsourced the development, and launched their first VAS. The product was a success, quickly validating their intuition that VAS would be profitable.

This agility allowed them to gain a big customer and enter a new product line that had a growing market. From 2001 through 2005, Shady and his team worked closely with Vodafone, creating customized VAS services in response to the telecom’s requests. For example, when Vodafone asked TA Telecom to produce content for a multimedia messaging service (MMS), Shady hired staff to design and deliver this content. Through such work, TA telecom’s staff built expertise in VAS services. They also learned how to serve the needs of a large telecom company. In 2004, TA Telecom noticed increasing demands for the production and aggregation of content that would be delivered to users by SMS or MMS. The company thus began creating and selling such content for Vodafone while also developing platforms to manage and sell mobile content. It also found new clients, telecom companies Mobinil and Etisalat. The company’s next important agile move occurred in 2006, when TA Telecom developed a product that would allow it to serve clients more efficiently. The company chose to decrease the number of customized VAS services for telecom companies it produced and instead built a standard product that it could sell to any client: a VAS delivery platform, which it called “BUZZ!” The platform delivers content to users, integrates with mobile operators’ payment collections systems to charge users, and provides data on users’ behavior (e.g., how many subscribers were added or lost after a certain action). BUZZ! has been responsible for most of TA Telecom’s profit, mostly from Etisalat in Egypt and Nigeria.

Growth PhasesTA Telecom has gone through several distinct growth phases as a company: it began by selling mobile advertising, expanded into customized VAS services, and later became a content creator and aggregator. Its most successful product, BUZZ!, was developed six years after the company was founded. All of these changes took place because the company studied users’ needs and developments in technology. This flexibility allowed them to identify successful products and services while phasing out unsuccessful ones.

“TA Telecom has been around for more than 10 years, but they’ve only been doing their current business since 2006,” says Youssri Helmy, General Partner at Newberry Ventures and Shady’s mentor through Endeavor, a global nonprofit that supports high-impact entrepreneurs in emerging markets. “Amr has kept the same company and brand name, but he has pivoted like Silicon Valley entrepreneurs,” says Youssri Helmy.

Silicon Valley became a reality soon after Shady co-invented along with TA Telecom’s Chief Data Scientist Omar Kamal, an analytic tool – Reveel – that measures the performance of subscription-based services and predicts future growth opportunities. The innovative tool now evolved into a company – Reveel Inc. – established recently by Shady in Silicon Valley.

Though the company’s agility benefited TA Telecom most times, it also led to a loss in revenues at least once. In 2007, in response to what they saw as users’ increasing interest in music, the company partnered with Shazam, a mobile-phone based music identification service. The partnership allowed users of feature phones to point their phone at a speaker and find out the name of the song using interactive voice response (IVR). TA Telecom invested a large amount of money to obtain a two-year exclusive agreement, develop the platform, aggregate the songs, and run an advertising campaign. When the service launched, it had no uptake and was discontinued. Nevertheless, this example indicates the company’s willingness to develop new products and test them, even if the tests sometimes end in failure. From this experience, TA Telecom learned how to build an innovations process to manage the selection and prototyping of new products. When it prepares to launch a new service, it minimizes the risks associated with launching the product.

Key Takeaways:Agility and staying response to a changing market, especially across countries and with different partners, has been an important characteristic of TA Telecom. Part of this learning curve also involved the company learning to be more flexible and adaptable in other areas of the business such as product development and validation. Perhaps most importantly, this belief in remaining agile allowed the company to maneuver throughout key growth phases as its model and strategy evolved over time.


foundation of Shady’s new company – Reveel Inc. – which he recently established in Silicon Valley, penetrating the U.S. market for the first time.

Using the Design of Experiment tool, the revenue growth team at TA Telecom conducts several experiments that measure the impact of certain variables on response rates and revenue. Factors such as price, offer duration, service type, campaign timing and text are cross-tabulated and examined to understand customer behavior and needs. The findings of the experiment are further analyzed using TA Telecom’s Reveel analytics tool to help the team gain insights and reach the best business decisions for growing revenues. Accordingly, the revenue growth team succeeded in raising the number of new acquired users across operators significantly in 2014.

Such analytics have also enabled the company to grow by penetrating the Egyptian market deeply. By continually monitoring data, the company has served its users successfully, growing profits significantly even in a market whose population is mostly poor.

“Their CEO has instilled a focus on data in the organization. That’s very rare in the region. TA Telecom uses analytics in everything they do,” says Dana Moussa, TA Telecom’s ex-account manager at Endeavor.

Key Takeaways:In MENA, the practice of using data to inform business decisions is still nascent. TA Telecom provides an example of how and why companies must rely on analytics to scale. The company’s experiences demonstrate the value of making data collection an important part of innovation and decision-making.

A strategic use of customer analytics enables companies to be aware of and meet their customers’ needs, whether they be in the bottom of the pyramid or another market segment.

Strategy two:Use data to understand your customer and drive innovationA heavy reliance on data mining and analytics has given TA Telecom valuable information that the company has harnessed to penetrate its market and grow its revenues successfully.

A primary example of the company’s data analysis practice dates back to 2009. When the company noticed that many users were dropping out of the VAS services it provided to one of its operator clients, management decided to gather and analyze data to identify the cause of this drop off. The company realized that prepaid client balance was responsible for the drop-off. Such users are often at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP), i.e., they are in the poorest socio-economic group, which is also the largest in Egypt. These users would very often not have enough money in their prepaid account to pay for a VAS service on the day of the month when they happened to be charged for it. As a result, the users’ payments bounced and their service was automatically discontinued.

Because the BoP is TA Telecom’s most important market segment, the company used this discovery to generate an innovative solution: it began charging users every other day, breaking up the monthly payment for a VAS subscription service into 15 micropayments. Since users almost always had a few cents in their accounts, this decreased the attrition rate significantly. Users stopped dropping off – and both TA Telecom’s and the operator’s revenues increased noticeably.

Staff at TA Telecom are now required to monitor data dashboards regularly to identify important trends or sudden changes in the company’s products’ performances.

Building expertise in analyticsTA Telecom’s venture into analytics is growing progressively. In 2014, Shady co-invented along with TA Telecom’s Chief Data Scientist Omar Kamal, an analytic tool – Reveel – that measures the performance of subscription-based services and predicts future growth opportunities. The Reveel analytic tool is the


Strategy three:Find corporate clients who can facilitate your expansionTA Telecom first began expanding into new countries by piggy backing off its corporate clients. In 2007, TA Telecom’s primary cli-ent, the telecom operator Etisalat, opened operations in Afghani-stan and Nigeria. The Etisalat team in Cairo and UAE recommend-ed TA Telecom to its teams in the new markets, and TA Telecom thus joined Etisalat as it expanded into Africa and Central Asia.

Etisalat then outsourced VAS production and management to TA telecom. Each quarter, the Etisalat team would estimate how much revenue their company would make from VAS services. It split this revenue with TA Telecom.

“Etisalat loved us because, through the customer analytics and innovation we did, we were always able to exceed their revenue targets. Their VAS or marketing teams were assigned revenue targets by upper management. We always increased the target set by 25% or more – and then we achieved it,” says Hatem Ramzy, Customer Relations Director at TA Telecom.

According to Bill Crawley, a telecom and IT expert and a board member of Mara-Ison, telecom operators are working in a chal-lenging environment with decreasing margins. When operators enter a new market, they can initially set prices for basic voice services. As new operators enter that market and competition in-creases, operators often drop their price on voice services in or-der to capture larger market share. The average revenue per user (ARPU) thus decreases. Operators seek to make that up in other services, including data and VAS.

That was where TA Telecom found a useful role to play. First in UAE and Egypt, and later in Nigeria and Afghanistan, TA Telecom ensured Etisalat higher revenues from VAS services than Etisalat would have likely generated on its own. Especially when the Etis-alat team was focused on the logistics of entering a new market (e.g., hiring a team, setting up infrastructure, and getting voice ser-vices running), TA Telecom’s ability to manage VAS services effec-tively was valuable to Etisalat.

The partnership was symbiotic. While Etisalat benefited from the ability to deploy VAS services immediately and exceed revenue targets, TA Telecom benefited from an easy way to enter new mar-kets. Rather than investing in office space, TA Telecom was able to manage one staff member in Nigeria and house her in Etisalat’s office. Running VAS services in Afghanistan and Nigeria gave TA Telecom the opportunity to build its knowledge of those markets, learning about the competition, testing products, and discovering how to serve those markets, just as it had previously in Egypt.

As TA Telecom expanded with Etisalat, the two companies signed exclusivity agreements. Initially, TA Telecom benefited from the ex-clusivity because it was mutual. Etisalat could not hire other VAS providers and TA Telecom had the freedom to experiment and op-timize its services without worrying about competition.

However, once TA Telecom had matured as a company, estab-lished its reputation, and increased its efficiency, it needed to grow further by selling its products and services to new clients. It could not approach mobile operators in Egypt, Nigeria, or Afghanistan due to its exclusivity agreement with Etisalat. Thus, piggybacking off of corporate clients to expand into new countries did have this drawback. Nevertheless, the benefits of an easy and protected expansion into new markets outweighed this drawback. These ex-clusivity agreements are now expiring. Moving forward, TA Telecom aims to sell its services in new markets without signing exclusivity agreements.

Key Takeaways:Corporate clients can facilitate expansion into new markets since they often exist in more than one. If a service or product is valu-able to a corporate client in one market, that client may purchase it for additional markets. TA Telecom expanded into new countries through its main customer, Etisalat. Such partnerships often involve exclusivity agreements. While TA Telecom was young and learning how to serve non-Egyptian markets, those exclusivity agreements were beneficial to it.


Strategy Four:Turn recruitment andretention into a scienceTA Telecom uses data not only to make business decisions and innovate, but also to optimize its talent recruitment and retention process. Doing so has been an important factor in scaling successfully. In the technology industry, constant innovation and adaption to new trends is key to succeeding – especially in a competitive, fragmented, and low-barrier space like the VAS market. TA Telecom has been able to retain its edge due to the talent it has recruited.

At first, the company struggled to find dedicated, dynamic employees: it received many applications for each open position, but candidates were of “average caliber already dissatisfied with their current jobs and looking to jump ship,” says Shady. “We were using the same approach others are using: we would announce that a position was open, we would get a stack of CVs, and we’d go through all the CVs,” adds Shady.

In 2012, after receiving mentorship on hiring from an Endeavor mentor, and visiting the LinkedIn office in Mountain View, California, Shady decided to change his strategy. Moving forward, he would always: 1) define what he needs in a candidate for a specific position, 2) use LinkedIn’s recruitment tool to find people with those qualifications, 3) approach and recruit that person directly, and 4) use psychometrics to establish a fit between position and candidate personality.

When Shady was searching for a person to lead his content development team, the process led him to Rania Al Malky, the editor-in-chief of a well-known newspaper in Cairo. He reached out to her, explained his vision for creating content for mobile phones, and successfully recruited her to the TA Telecom team.

“We now do a proactive search for the right person with the right experience,” says Shady. “Rather than hiring someone who wants to leave their company and is dissatisfied with it for some reason, we go after the person who is the right match and happy where he is,” says Shady.

Leveraging data to maintain the teamIn addition to using data to recruit talent, TA Telecom uses data to retain talent. Shady asks employees to take a personality test designed by Thomas International to assess what motivates them. Managers then know whether their employees are more incentivized by monetary rewards, recognition, flexibility, challenges, or other factors. They share the results with the employee to increase that person’s self-awareness and job satisfaction.

Managing so much data and implementing the lessons it reveals takes time. Thus, in January 2012, the company hired an HR manager. This person’s mission is to recruit and retain the right talent to enable TA Telecom to continue growing successfully as a company.

Now, TA Telecom uses an array of incentives to retain employees, including: recognition, ownership of projects, clear goals (KPIs), bi-annual reviews, an annual performance bonus, a 13th month of pay, gift certificates as thank you vouchers, flexibility (employees can work from home, arrive late, or leave early occasionally), and training (employees are sent to training in Egypt and abroad).

Additionally, TA Telecom uses Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey staff to measure satisfaction and solicit feedback. In the most recent survey, 38% of staff rated their satisfaction as an 8 or 9 out of 10, 43% rated it as a 7 or 8 out of 10, and 19% scored it as a 6 or lower. Employees’ main feedback was that they wanted to redesign the office. TA Telecom is now remodeling its space, using Facebook’s and Google’s workspace design as a model.

Although employees say that all of these measures keep them happy, the ones we interviewed credited their satisfaction to the company culture above anything else. Employees said that they get along well with most of their coworkers, everyone is driven and creative, they get ownership over their work, and they receive recognition for their accomplishments. This satisfaction is likely tied to TA Telecom’s thoughtful and rigorous recruitment methods, which impact the types of people hired and therefore the company culture.

Key Takeaways:In order to scale and compete successfully, companies need diligent, creative employees. TA Telecom collects and analyzes data to recruit and retain talent. It has turned this into a near science, hiring an HR manager responsible for measuring and improving employee satisfaction.

TA Telecom’s experience indicates that investing resources into implementing a rigorous talent recruitment and retention process is well worth the time and effort.


The Path Forward:TA Telecom’s success thus far sheds light on possible strategies that other entrepreneurs in MENA could use to scale their companies. Of course, as a startup, TA Telecom has inevitably been experimenting and learning from its experiences. In retrospect, the company’s management says it could have been more successful if it had expanded into Africa sooner. TA Telecom was very focused on improving its products and serving its clients in Egypt through 2012. Thus, the company did not start seeking new clients in Sub-Saharan (SSA) Africa until 2013. This was late compared to others: the telecom industry had started aggressively targeting SSA in 2010. Also, TA Telecom’s advisors are concerned that its revenue is very dependent on BUZZ!, its VAS platform. The company recently established a structured innovation process to develop new products. If it had done so earlier, it would have been sheltered from its current dependence on BUZZ!.

The next few years will be decisive ones for the company. As a successful data analytics and VAS company, it could receive offers to be purchased by a telecom operator that wants to bring its capabilities in-house, a larger telecom equipment provider lagging in MENA looking to augment their offering to mobile operators with service management, and differentiate from other low cost equipment providers, or from a larger VAS provider outside the region looking to grow faster and stronger in MEA.

If TA Telecom remains a standalone company instead of being purchased by a telecom operator, equipment manufacturer or VAS provider, it will need to maintain momentum in several areas to continue scaling and prove its business model. First, the company has the chance to continue to aggressively expand in the SSA market successfully, yet each African country has its own characteristics and market needs. TA Telecom will need to understand its users there as well as it has understood users in Egypt in order to produce relevant VAS services for each market. Because the VAS market is competitive in the region, and because TA Telecom will no longer be using exclusivity agreements, the company will also need to develop VAS services that are “stickier,” i.e., ones that end users love and that operators cannot easily replace through another VAS provider or through their own solutions.10

Second, TA Telecom must show that it can remain innovative and agile, launching new products and diversifying its offerings. As they go to market, the company will also be testing its new innovation process. If these go well, TA Telecom may pivot, possibly branching out into technologies that do not involve VAS at all such as its analytics venture, Reveel Inc., in Silicon Valley.

Finally, increased smartphone penetration may also pose a challenge for TA Telecom. Users may prefer free applications for their smartphones instead of a VAS service. The company is already conducting analytics on smartphone users to explore what VAS services will continue to be relevant to such users. it has already released a number of smartphone applications.

During its first decade, TA Telecom has demonstrated its ability to pivot and grow successfully. Because it has grown its revenues exponentially without any outside investments, it can now afford to pursue research and development and expand into SSA. The company has already chosen many strategies that can serve as a model to other MENA companies seeking to scale. The next few years will reveal whether TA Telecom can remain adaptable and relevant as it expands into new countries and achieves even greater growth.

Primary Sources 2013.

Endeavor Egypt. 2013.

2013.

2013.

Secondary SourcesWork in MENAT. General Electric. 2014.

Not Start-Up, Harvard Business Review. 2012.

Africa Region - SMEs for job creation in the Arab world, World Bank. 2012.

East and the Job Market, Carnegie Middle East Center. 2011.

MENA’s Entrepreneurs. 2014.

10 An example of a “sticky” VAS service is M-Pesa, the mobile phone-based money transfer system. M-Pesa is essentially a branchless banking service. It has relationships with institutions (e.g., convenience stores) that serve like bank branches, accepting and releasing M-Pesa payments. M-Pesa is so popular in Kenya that people often choose mobile operators based on the availability of this VAS service. In order to replace M-Pesa, a mobile operator or a competing VAS provider would need to develop not only the platform and the application, it would also need to establish relationships with the institutions that release and accept payments. This makes the barrier-to-entry much higher and increases M-Pesa’s “stickiness.”

Customer Analytics, Agility, and Corporate Partnerships:How TA Telecom Expanded Beyond Egypt by Wamda Research Lab is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

customer analytics, agility, and corporate partnerships · the research and writing of this case...

Documents