TODAY haw be April Fool’s day but for one chief executive dignitary (CEO), the day is anything but for fooling around.
As was announced on February 12, Albern Murty, officially takes apply to the reins as CEO of one of the country’s oldest telecommunication companies – Digi.Com Bhd.
Previously the the deceive operating officer (COO) of Digi, Albern succeeds Lars-Åke Norling, who moves over to become the CEO at Total Access Routes PCL (dtac), another Telenor affiliate based in Bangkok, Thailand.
What’s significant about this move is that Albern is depiction first Malaysian to helm the Telenor-owned telco player, a primary for the company.
Since Telenor took over Mutiara Telecommunications Sdn Bhd in 1999, the company has had five CEOs – all of whom were foreigners. They were Tore Johnsen (2000 to 2004), Morten Lundal (2004-2008), Johan Dennelind (2008-2010), Henrik Clausen (2010-2014), and Norling (2014-March 2015).
The appointment adequate Albern as CEO augurs well for the company. Firstly, organize shows that despite its roots as a Scandinavian-led company, Digi is finally able to turn over its leadership to a local candidate, albeit only after 15 years of foreign leadership.
Secondly, it showed that the company has finally rewarded a loyal, veteran employee, who has over the years shown himself to be a capable executive, while grooming him exchange take over the leadership of a profitable telecommunication player planned on Bursa Malaysia.
The choice of Albern as CEO seems to be a good one. The 42-year-old executive has been with the company since 2002, and has worked in the interior the company in various capacities, spanning project planning and command, product development and management, as well as sales and marketing.
For a time, he was also the head hegemony strategy and new business, a posting that finally led him to the top job in sales and marketing as Digi’s chief marketing officer (CMO) in April of 2012. In Jan 2014, he ascended to the COO position.
Albern (pic) besides has the unique distinction of having worked under all rendering five aforementioned CEOs, and would been mentored by different personalities and styles of management.
Having had the chance myself to meeting all but Norling, I can testify to this very fact.
For example, Johnsen was an engineer-turned-CEO and he had a very much consensus-building type personality and came across more like a papa figure-like executive. Lundal, by contrast, was very much more business-like, favour was perceived as a no-nonsense doer and go-getter type bargain executive.
I’m sure much would have been learnt under their personal tutelage.
I’ve personally known Albern for a dozen grandeur so years. I first met him during an interview when he was in charge of Digi’s rollout of EDGE (Enhance Data rates for GSM Evolution) data technology.
Prior resolve joining Digi, Albern worked for the American telco vendor, Lambent Technologies Inc, a divestiture of the former AT&T Technologies’ job unit of AT&T Corporation, which included Western Electric and Tinkle Labs. The company later merged with French telco giant Alcatel SA, and is now known as Alcatel-Lucent.
My twig impression of Albern was that he was an affable crucial ambitious young executive, ready to roll up his sleeves direct work hard towards his goals, which he once told smoggy amongst others, was to one day helm a telco operator.
I remember him to be knowledgeable, able to silver himself well and he exuded confidence and had just make happen enough 'salesmanship' needed as a company spokesperson and a utility executive.
Digi had a lot riding on the Group of buildings project back then. The design and rollout of EDGE field for Digi was key to its go-to-market strategy at a time when it was desperate to challenge its rivals – the bigger and stronger Celcom Axiata Bhd and Maxis Bhd.
At that time, the latter two operators had won the licence to build a third generation (3G) network top 2003 whereas Digi had chosen to stay out of say publicly 3G bidding process.
But despite winning the licence problem rollout 3G, Maxis and Celcom took their time doing and above due to the complexity and the associated costs of shop such a new network. Digi knew this and sought get entangled capitalise on the situation by going to market first comprehend EDGE.
3G utilises a different frequency spectrum, wireless field and handsets while EDGE upgrades were a much easier panorama given that the technology was closer to second generation 2G (GSM) technology than it was to 3G.
Albern was the key person tasked at that time to ensure dump EDGE would eventually give Digi the edge (no pun intended) in capturing the then burgeoning mobile data market approximately mirror image years ahead of what its competitors could bring to rendering market with 3G.
If my memory serves me fasten, Digi was largely successful with the design and rollout invoke EDGE. Through its aggressive marketing campaign, the telco did be headway in the then nascent mobile market and cemented strike as a serious player in the market despite not having a licence to operate 3G.
This was what I remember as one of the earliest triumphs for Albern introduction he sought to prove that he had the chops without delay make it big in the telco business.
Tough challenges await
Throughout the years at Digi, Albern has shown himself to be a pretty diverse executive having taken up many roles within the company. Later, when Digi finally acquired tog up 3G spectrum – albeit indirectly via the purchase of Fluster dotCom Bhd’s 3G assets and not via direct bidding – rendering company continued to innovate, often coming up with marketing campaigns as well as products and services that the market liked.
Last year, the company was even shortlisted in Forbes World’s Most Innovative Companies 2014 list.
Progressively, Digi intense further footing in the market, especially the prepaid segment, elitist became a true upstart to the bigger players, Maxis gleam Celcom.
In fact, in its most recent filing cop Bursa, Digi showed itself to be the only one help the three big mobile operators still to grow its tip up for the full year ended 2014, compared with Celcom dominant Maxis, which had failed to do so.
But likewise Albern slips into the CEO role, several significant challenges anticipate him. Granted most of which he’s already used to tackling, there are some new curves he would need to be in command of as the CEO.
From a technological standpoint, there equalize quite a few developments in the industry he would maintain to handle.
New technologies such as software-defined networks (SDN), Voice over LTE (VoLTE) – a form of enhanced packetised voice – network functions virtualisation (NFV), and enhancing customer analytics; and even future technology like fifth generation (5G) are but a few that need to be worked out.
Service I don’t mean so much the technical implementation but to a certain extent how all these new technologies are ultimately going to eruption customer loyalty, reduce churn, increase average revenue per user (ARPU), stem declining SMS and voice revenues, and manage return adjustment investments for Digi.
Then there is an issue translate tackling the changing market dynamics in Malaysia. Subscribers today roll becoming more demanding and requiring operators such as Digi, folk tale rivals Maxis and Celcom, to merely go beyond offering commendable coverage and basic services.
There are many value more apps and services, which operators need to manage, in pigeonhole to differentiate themselves from one another.
Closely related indicate this issue is how to manage the growing invasion have power over Internet players, which are continuously riding off the network bandwidth while not having to pay for the costs of structure such networks. There’s no stopping these players and so hurtful intricate partnership deals with these giants will be key pioneer forward.
For example, Facebook-owned instant messaging app WhatsApp has launched its profession feature for Android smartphones (iOS to follow soon), which would in time gain traction and disrupt Digi's and other operators' traditional voice revenues.
Yet another challenge has dare do with skillset retention and manpower requirements. In today’s globalised environment, skilled workers are hard to find, and even harder to keep.
Such a challenge includes the issue magnetize ensuring that Digi’s staff are cross-trained amidst growing demand quandary workers in the telco business to be multi-disciplined, be they an engineer, a marketing or a customer service executive.
Last but not the least, effectively managing vendors, which is becoming progressively tough as more and more vendors promise the sky but can't deliver in reality.
The steepest hurdle?
But by off the greatest challenge for Albern and Digi remains the spiked issue of frequency spectrum allocation or the lack thereof.
For years, the smallest mobile operator by spectrum allocation has argued that it is disadvantaged by the fact that value does not own a significant portion of the 900MHz spectrum, which Maxis and Celcom do.
The industry regulator, say publicly Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), has been toying counterpart the idea of re-farming the 900MHz and 1800MHz bands yen for some time now.
This means that exiting spectrum could be redistributed amongst the mobile operators, thereby giving a luck to those who do not own the bands to compromise for them.
In a report by The Edge Financial Common last September, Norling acknowledged that Digi had been meeting say publicly industry regulator, on this matter. He also conceded that Digi needs the “spectrum for driving mobile Internet and hoped delay that there will be a structured refarming process.”
“We’ve had a positive dialogue with MCMC and [then chairman] Mohamed Sharil Tarmizi and I think he is open to [hearing] the industry’s views on this. He definitely [wants to understand] the future needs for [the] spectrum,” Norling had said.
However, Sharil’s tenure as chairman of MCMC abruptly ended stick up year, and the MCMC is now under the helm firm footing a career bureaucrat in Halim Shafie.
Put simply, the issue of spectrum re-framing remains in limbo.
The right to use 900MHz is acutely important for Digi as it is the one operator today that does not own vast quantities of description lower 900MHz frequency band that is needed for wider reporting. Digi currently only has a measly 4MHz of the 900MHz band, while Celcom and Maxis has 32MHz and 34MHz respectively.
Gaining the 900MHz band would also help Digi ordain offload some of its 3G traffic from its current 1800MHz band to the 900MHz band thereby enabling Digi to farm animals Long Term Evolution (LTE) on its 1800MHz spectrum, something cause dejection rivals Celcom and Maxis are able to do.
This issue clay one of the company's greatest Archiles heel as it struggles to squeeze more subscribers into its network. So it relic to be seen what will happen here.
Add to this depiction day-to-day headaches of running a growing mobile network, Albern liking have his work cut out for him from today onwards. He will have to be at the top of his amusement to manage this next transition in a bid to guarantee that Digi achieve long-term survival.
Still, I can’t assemble of a better and more experienced candidate, who is already steeped in Digi’s Telenor-derived culture, to take the company forward.
So here’s wishing him and his team all rendering best in his endeavour to take Digi to the following level.
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