The annual EurasiaCom event closed today on a high note with lively debates, great discussions and insightful opportunities

The annual EurasiaCom event closed today in Istanbul after two days of lively debates on the future of the telecoms and digital sector in the region.

After a first day focused on operator strategies, LTE and the Internet of Things, the second day looked at cost-efficiency, how to monetise content & apps services and mobile money opportunities. The discussions gave a very insightful overview of the major opportunities and challenges faced by operators in the region: growing profitability while investing in more powerful networks and facing renewed competition from OTT providers.

The event was hosted by operator Turkcell and sponsored by Mahindra Comviva. The speaker line-up gave a broad representation of the region's most dynamic companies, from large operators in developed markets to smaller players in emerging ones. Companies represented on the programme included operators Turk Telekom, MTS, Bakcell, Azqtel, TTNET, Azerfon, Mobitel, Deutsche Telekom, Mynet, Play Mobile, as well as regulators and vendors.

"EurasiaCom provides a great opportunity for very different operators and service providers to network, to share experiences,  and ultimately deliver better services to the end-users" says Julie Rey, Research Director at organisers Informa Telecoms & Media.

EurasiaCom is part of the Com World Series, delivering high-level strategic events to key emerging markets. The next event, East Africa Com will take place in Kenya in May. 


Have a look at what a few people had to say about EurasiaCom 2014:

“Professionally organized, effective usage of time, highly international audience, efficient networking possibilities. The sessions were very informative, with a great range of speakers."

Murad Onol

Protel and TUYAD

“Great speed networking sessions at EurasiaCom! Perfect way to meet and discuss our products with Turkish and CIS Mobile Operators. Thanks Aleksandra!”

Erik Van Thielen

VP Business Development

“Fantastic way to network with operators in short timeslots. Would love to engage in it AGAIN!”

M. Dimitrova

Anritsu

“The great speed networking event enabled me to meet many operators I would normally have a hard time hunting down in an event”

Lars Isaksson

Sales Director

Netadmin Systems

“Definitely an effective event to network in the region. We especially liked the “speed networking”; it helps to get to know regional players quite efficiently! Thank you!”

Ramin Ramezani

MoveEuropa Service

“Thank you so much for EurasiaCom. It was very interesting and well organized event. We will definitely come back again!”

SkyTel Mongolia

Visit the website to find out what else happened at EurasiaCom 2014.

Turk Telekom to grow business into Macedonia?

Looking back over some of the stories which popped up while I was away on holiday, I noticed that Global Mobile Daily picked up news of the Turkish incumbent fixed-line operator's interest in acquiring the 2nd-placed MNO in the small market of Macedonia (population approx 2 million). I am not clear to what extent any new owner (other interested parties seem to include Telekom Austria and Telekom Slovenije) would be able to grow the business. In addition to the Balkan country being a market of limited size, it is one for which our WCIS reports mobile penetration as 112.17% as of September 2008. Moreover, first-placed T-Mobile has established a commanding lead in terms of market share. According to WCIS, the Deutsche Telekom-aligned cellco owns 67.88% of subscriptions versus market shares of 32.13% and 12.16% for Cosmofon and VIP respectively.

VIP is part of the mobilkom austria group, itself a subsidiary of Telekom Austria - so if the Austrian incumbent's reported interest in Cosmofon is for real, I would assume that they would be thinking in terms of consolidating the Macedonian market down to two players.

Cosmofon's current owner is the Cosmote group, a company controlled by Greek incumbent carrier OTE. Assuming that the Greek group welcomes the interest being shown in its Macedonian outpost, this seems to represent another retreat from an East European market, OTE having not long quit Armenia. OTE sold its interest in Armentel, that country's then-monopolist wireline carrier (and associated mobile business) to Vimpelcom of Russia in late 2006.

If the Cosmofon story has played out by the end of March, and if Turk Telekom prevails, I daresay delegates at our Eurasia Com event in Istanbul will be keen to ask the company's CEO Dr. Paul Doany where the acquisition fits into his broader strategy.

Eurasia Com: Azeri and Tajik delegations announced

This morning we have more good news about the size, diversity and seniority of the group set to assemble at our Eurasia Com conference in Istanbul (31 March & 1 April 2009). The already-strong panel of speakers is to be boosted by the presence of the General Directors of two of the Eurasia region's state-owned incumbent wireline carriers.

Tajiktelecom will be represented by Mr Rahmunali Hasanov, joined by his counterpart from AzTelecom, Mr Magomed Mamedov. With the Kyrgyz incumbent operator already represented by its General Director and CTO, and with Türk Telekom CEO Dr. Paul Doany opening the event with a Welcome Keynote Address, Eurasia Com 2009 is shaping up to be the biggest, best event we've ever hosted for telcos in the Central Asia and Caucasus regions.

Yesterday, I was pleased to learn that ECI Telecom, a leading supplier of networking infrastructure for carrier and service provider networks worldwide, had been signed up as a Eurasia Com sponsor. We look forward to introducing the ECI Telecom team on-site to the carrier delegations whose presence we are currently confirming. As a sponsor, ECI Telecom can expect to gain privileged access to new contacts from across this high-growth region. We urge other telecoms tech vendors interested in the region to avail themselves of this opportunity also.

Eurasia Com boosted by confirmation of Turk Telekom CEO

I am delighted to announce that the profile of next year's 5th annual Eurasia Com conference in Istanbul (31 March & 1 April 2009) will be boosted significantly by the presence of Dr. Paul Doany, which was confirmed this morning.

Dr. Doany is the CEO of both Türk Telekom and Oger Telecom, an emerging markets telecommunications group controlled by the Saudi Oger Group, one of the Middle-East's most prominent multi-sector organisations. Dr. Doany will be welcoming international visitors to the conference with a Keynote Address on the morning of 31 March, and has been invited to use this speaking opportunity to outline his vision for the development of world-class services in Turkey and in developing markets elsewhere. Eurasia Com attracts delegates from the telecoms businesses of Turkey and the former Soviet Republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia. The event therefore offers a highly convenient one-stop shop for anyone looking to do business with the operators and service providers of this fast-developing region.

Türk Telekom, Turkey's incumbent fixed-line operator, owns a majority stake in MNO Avea, which continues to lag behind rivals Turkcell and Vodafone in terms of market share. I've commented this week on speculation around how the recent implementation of MNP in Turkey will affect how the mobile market is divided up and I daresay that Eurasia Com 2009 will be taking place against a background of ongoing battles for high-value subscribers.

Turkey's MNP adventure gets underway

Our Global Mobile Daily service last week told me that there had been around 50,000 porting requests in Turkey on the first day of MNP being available in the country. The story went on to say "it is thought that up to seven million porting requests could eventually be made by subscribers of the country’s three networks, Turkcell, Vodafone Turkey, and Avea."

Working to create the next iteration of our annual Istanbul Eurasia Com conference and exhibition has led me to watch the Turkish market a little more closely of late than I get the chance to do throughout the rest of the year. I daresay anyone asking about burning issues for Turkish cellco execs would get the same sorts of answers I've been hearing. 3G licensing, MVNOs and MNP are the three hottest topics. With this in mind, as well as making the usual calls, I tried using our Eurasia Com LinkedIn group to get a sense of who is set to gain from these developments. When asking which operator is set to gain most from the implementation of MNP, I've received a pretty mixed bag of responses. One school of thought seems to be that MNP will work well for third-placed Avea, which is owned by incumbent carrier Turk Telekom, the theory being that they will win market share by competing aggressively on price. Others feel that Turkcell, having made more progress with getting ready to launch 3G services, will gain by finding it easier to nab subscribers from rival networks less able to offer attractive services. I won't pretend to know enough to take a view one way or the other.

In other Eurasia Com-related news, I am pleased to announce our partnership with the organisers of Mobile Monday Istanbul. We are proud to be hosting the April 2009 meeting, which will immediately follow the day two conference sessions at Eurasia Com. Also, I gladly accepted the organisers' kind invitation to attend the January meeting and offer an overview of the Informa Telecoms & Media take on mobile social networking.

3G, MNP, MVNOs set to shake up Turkish mobile market?

Preparations are now well underway for our annual Eurasia Com conference, the next iteration of which will take place 31st March & 1st April 2009 at the Mövenpick Hotel in Istanbul. I am pleased that after two years of hosting this event in venues on the fringes of the world's third largest city, we are now able to hold the discussions and networking in a more central location. Next year's venue is in easy striking distance of the Taksim Square shopping and entertainment hub at the heart of Istanbul. This will make life easier for sponsors and exhibitors looking to entertain telco operator clients in the evenings and should boost the number of visitors we get from the many Turkish telco sector companies with headquarters in the city.

The conference is definitely a draw for major Turkish telcos. In the last two years, we've welcomed luminaries such as Tayfun Çataltepe (Chief Strategy/International Expansion Officer at Turkcell), Tulin Karabuk (Chief Investment Officer, Turkcell) and Mehmet Toros (COO, Türk Telekom). However, many of our sponsors support the event not only to reach out to Turkish companies, but also to tap into the high growth CIS markets of the Caspian Sea region and Central Asia. We therefore need to make the event attractive for visitors from these countries. While a pleasant downtown location is perhaps not the most important factor, it can't hurt - so I was happy to shower praise on our operations/venues people for securing this welcome upgrade.

I've been joined this week by a newly-hired Russian-speaking colleague who, as I write this, is on the phone gathering the lastest market intelligence from countries including Azerbijan, Georgia, Armenia and Kazakhstan. Every day, I am handed valuable nuggets of information which will definitely impact on the content and format of the Eurasia Com conference agenda. We are getting a clearer sense than ever before of the challenges and opportunities facing operators in these markets and I think we now know what to do in terms of creating a must-attend event which should gather the region's telcos in ever better numbers.

Meanwhile, I am catching up with contacts in Turkey, with a view to finding out which issues are keeping telco execs in that country awake at night. One of the most interesting conversations I've had this week was with someone at one of Turkey's mobile services distributors. Among the things I was told:

• Mobile Number Portability will be implemented very soon; my respondent felt that the country's 3rd placed mobile operator is welcoming this as a great opportunity to build market share through more aggressive competition on price.
• Two of Turkey's three MNOs are testing their 3G networks, which my respondent expects to go live in Q2 2009; my respondent predicts that Turkcell will move fastest to get the networking up and running, largely because of an urgent need to address network capacity issues.
• After some buzz of interest in the possible launch of MVNOs, there is now concern that the current tax regime is set to make the business case less attractive that once hoped.

The next time I get the opportunity to write something here, I aim to share a few snippet about what's happening across the wider Eurasia region our conference and exhibition will serve.

Catching up on developments across Eurasia

We will very shortly be getting to work on the arrangements for our 5th annual Eurasia Com conference and exhibition in Turkey. The event will take place 25-26 March 2009, with Istanbul being the host city for the third consecutive year, following on from an initial two years in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

For us, the term 'Eurasia' maps quite closely to TeliaSonera's use of this sometimes ambiguous word. With reference to the company's TeliaSonera Eurasia business area, the giant Scandinavian telco, like us, seems to use the term 'Eurasia' in the geopolitical sense, i.e. as a (neutral) way of referring to the post-Soviet states, in particular the Central Asian republics and the Transcaucasian republics.

So, our Eurasia Com conference, as well as attracting plenty of delegates from the host country's operators (Turkcell, Turk Telekom, Avea etc.), is really designed to offer networking and learning opportunities to execs from the service providers of Caspian states (Armenia, Azerbijan, Georgia) and 'the -stans' of Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan. Mongolian delegates have also shown up in pretty good numbers for the last two years.

We find that a number of tech vendors we speak with find this to be an interesting but challenging region. Growth potential is good: mobile markets are some way from reaching European-levels of penetration, 3G networks are not yet ubiquitous, wireline teledensity is quite low. However, my own experiences of developing contacts in this part of the world make me realise that it's not always easy for some companies to explore the possibilities and do business with the operators that are taking advantage of the growth opportunities. So we believe that our event offers a uniquely valuable one-stop shop for vendors looking to make improve their connections in this region.

I am therefore working to catch up with any interesting developments that have taken place across these markets since we last visited Istanbul in April this year. A notable one is TeliaSonera's integration of two previously separate mobile operators in Tajikistan, Indigo and Somoncom. These two companies were among the assets the Scandinavian telco acquired when it bought U.S.-based MCT Corp. back in 2007. MCT also had stakes in Coscom of Uzbekistan (now rebranded UCell) as well as a smaller stake in Roshan of Afghanistan. According to a Global Mobile Daily report last week, Ucell have just launched 3G services in the cities of Tashkent and Samarkand. This leaves Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan as the region's markets that had not reported W-CDMA subscriptions to the World Cellular Information Service by June of this year. Turkey's 3G licensing process has been much delayed so, overall, I expect Eurasia Com to be attended by a lot of delegates who have yet to gain extensive experience working in a market where 3G services are available. If that translates into pent-up demand to learn from colleagues who do have useful experiences and insights to offer, we should see very lively networking and discussions.