07 May 2021
The rebrand from Liquid Telecom to Liquid Intelligent Technologies highlights the organisation’s expansion of its cloud business, cyber security services and other technologies added to its capabilities.
Robert Shepherd catches up with its group chief operating officer, Ahmad Mokhles Aly El-Deen...
What is the current state of the African market?
The Covid-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on industries worldwide, but especially in Africa. The first one concerns mobility. Previously, people thought mobility was the answer to everything. It may have been the case at one time, but it certainly isn’t now since the pandemic. Times have changed because employees might have to work from a secondary location either due to the lockdown or because they want to keep safe. So, what we find now is that most people are adapting to what we call the modern workplace.
Meaning, organisation have opted for a hybrid model, where staff go into the office as little as once a week and work from home predominantly. With that in mind, I don’t believe the old 9 AM-5 PM applies to the African workforce any longer. We’re all going to be working remotely more and more. We can work from anywhere because, thankfully, we have the right digital tools.
What are the most obvious changes you’ve noticed?
We found that as a digital and technology provider in Africa, people are adapting more to and embracing fibre to the home (FTTH) and fixed wireless access (FWA) to be connected at their home or premises.
Once you open that layer of connectivity, we are adapting to a new way of using all digital tools, such as Microsoft 365, Microsoft teams and Dropbox. We see a tremendous increase in the adoption of these tools.
What impact has Covid had in terms of positives and negatives?
There are two parts to this conversation. The first one is that organisations downsized their ICT spend to their offices since employees are working remotely. To ensure that we cater to the changing need of our customers, Liquid developed its Work from Home offering that was tailor-made for the individual needs of the different industries. This ranged from enabling employees to transfer their office extension to their mobile devices or even their computers at home or seamlessly access secure documents without worry of a data breach. By partnering with our customers for their evolving needs, Liquid has helped them accelerate their digital adoption.
Having said that, as a business, we decided to take a step back to understand what the new normal meant for our customers and for us. Currently, businesses are just talking about the new normal. Still, no business has visualised how we need to adapt and change themselves as a digital infrastructure or as a technology player to work and compete in the new normal.
Why did Liquid embark on a repositioning?
We had developed a platform of business assessments for businesses in Africa called ‘Digital Maturity Index ‘; through this platform, we reached out to businesses irrespective of their industry. The aim was to understand and measure the digital capability, readiness and adoption of these organisations, the outcome helped improve our understanding that businesses on the continent don’t have challenges when it comes to digital readiness and capabilities. Their main hurdle was the adoption and use of the digital tools by the end-users.
Armed with these key market insights, we could visualise the new direction for the company as Liquid Intelligent Technologies. As an organisation, Liquid is committed to ensuring that all Africans on the continent are digitally included. Stepping back to understand the industry we operate in and the changing needs of our customers enabled us to envisage what the brand would look like, the new promise we will offer to individuals, SMEs / Pan African MNC’s and other businesses in Africa.
How will customers benefit from the repositioning?
This rebrand to Liquid Intelligent Technologies reflects the evolution of our organisation’s product offerings and structure to deliver on our promise of realising Africa’s digital future. We are not just one operating company, and we now have eight strategic business units under the larger brand name.
Over the last two decades, we have firmly established ourselves as the leading independent pan-African digital infrastructure provider with an extensive network. The legacy of our organisation was founded in telecommunications, and we are maintaining our digital infrastructure under the sub-brand of Liquid Networks.
Through our Liquid Sea unit, customers get access to our sub-sea cables that we either own or are part of the shareholder structure. For our customers in remote rural areas, like a school in a remote village in Rwanda or an NGO in South Sudan, through Liquid Satellite, we can still offer you connectivity, enabling these institutions to collaborate and develop students. This is the overarching architecture, i.e. the connectivity layer.
Today employees are not just restricted to working from the office. Our two new business units Liquid Home and Liquid Business, caters to these evolving needs. With our Home offering, we have brought high-quality connectivity, fixed wireless access and over the top content bundled solutions to create a seamless work experience irrespective of the employee’s location. Through Liquid Business, we have introduced a variety of Managed Services that use our world-class intelligent technologies to assist with your evolving business needs like remote working and digital transformation.
With Liquid Cloud and Liquid Cyber Security, we can assist our customers by securely accelerating their digital transformation by bringing them world-class services. And finally, as a measure to ensure we are focusing on the continent’s digital future, we are increasing the investment towards innovation, research and development section of our business under the name Liquid Labs.
What is Liquid’s financial investment in Africa?
We have a strong presence in Africa, with numerous financial investments. It was our continuous investment into the continent that enabled the extremely successful refinancing of our bond refinancing package, totalling a combined US$840 million. This was a benchmark across the debt market in all emerging markets and not just in Africa. The order book, was more than 5.5 times oversubscribed, helping to drive a coupon rate down compared to the Group’s previous debut bond coupon in July 2017.
What are Liquid’s key differentiators?
We have three key focus areas on how we differentiate ourselves from our competitors. The first is that we always listen to feedback from our customers; listening to our customers is core to our operations. Secondly, we focus a lot on innovation. Liquid operates in an industry where we need to innovate our business model to empower our customers to stay ahead of their competition. And last but not least, our passion for the African continent. We are an African company, and we care deeply about digital inclusion and aim continuously to leave no one behind on the continent.
What opportunities does Liquid see in Africa?
We are a company looking for growth, so if there is an opportunity for organic growth in a country or region, we will always be interested. Nowadays, most interest is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Nigeria. If you take these as two standalone countries, there are 100 million and 200 million, respectively – that’s 300 million people that will be covered by Liquid Intelligent Technologies. The great news is we recently invested in DRC and have built 2,200km of our digital corridor connecting the country to the rest of Africa. This investment has allowed Liquid to bring digital connectivity to numerous cities, town, villages and other rural areas.
Nigeria as a country is a big focus not just for Liquid but also the Econet Group. As you can imagine, 200 million people with limited access to digital infrastructure is the perfect opportunity for us to extend our operations. Nigeria is not a country; it’s a continent. If you want to do business in Africa, you need to start in Nigeria. If you ever visit, you will find the kinds of businesses, different languages and way of doing business is very encouraging for an investor like us.
Is it true that Africa is a difficult place for foreign firms to do business?
I wouldn’t call it difficult, but I would say any foreign investor must embrace the local culture, the way of doing business and, of course, the regulations. Our African intelligence has been gained after working on the continent for over two decades and operations covering 15 countries. This helps us understand how we can adapt and comply with the local laws in different nations.