LIVE FROM OPERATIONS TRANSFORMATION FORUM 2018: Turkcell chief Kaan Terzioglu claimed the company is in talks with “about 30 different operators” through its Lifecell Ventures arm, which is intended to share its digital services know-how and technology.

The CEO said the company is engaging with companies “from Southeast Asia to the Caribbean”, about “how we can create digital economies in every one of these single countries, and make them also successful”.

Terzioglu said that it is looking at Lifecell Ventures to work with companies, “especially in emerging markets, who may not have 1,000 R&D engineers or be at the right time to make those investments”.

A revenue-share agreement has already been announced with Moldcell for the use of Turkcell’s digital communications platform BiP, which at the time was described as “a major step towards the globalisation of our digital services”.

Citing revenue growth over the last 24 months of 52 per cent for Turkcell, he observed: “Being the digital operator has been the recipe for success for us.”

One of the operator’s first steps on the road to digital transformation was to “repurpose 1,000 R&D people that we had, from playing with the hardware, to focusing on digital services: digital services that our customers actually love to consume”.

“We thought, how do we stop being a company – actually an industry – complaining about demand growth, and really turn that demand growth – data consumption – into something useful,” the CEO said.

Success factors
Areas Terzioglu cited for success include traffic management, to enable access to the digital advertising market (Turkcell is behind a national search engine which already has an 8 per cent market share); credentials management; mobile payments; and data-related tasks such as data centre provision, analytics and security.

He continued: “Of course, we need to be partnering with all sorts of player in the marketplace to create digital content, from travel services to games, entertainment services, education and healthcare. And as we do this, you will see new business models evolving, like our e-commerce platform, where we go to the merchants and invite them to our data centres, provide them secure, scalable platforms, we provide their website credentials management platform, so their customers do not connect their services with Facebook Connect.”

And through the growth of IoT and other digitalisation technologies, “in industry 4.0, we will be part of every industry’s value chain”. Turkcell is working with companies in a number of key areas, “which are also important to the development of the country,” he said.