Apelby now has its offices in key global markets. From a global perspective, the same products are offered in telecommunications services, but the specificities of the markets are different. We have prepared a mini-series of articles for you in which we ask Apelby's regional managers for their views and experience from the markets where they operate. The scope will be wide, as Apelby operates not only in Europe, America and the Middle East, but also in Asia and Africa.
Today we asked Marco Cacciaglia – Sales Director South Europe, ME and North Africa in his office in Rome and asked about the specifics of his market.
1. Marco, you are currently working on the SE-ME-NA market for Apelby since March 2018 but you know this market since a lot of years. What are the main transformations happened in these last years in your opinion?
Working from Italy allows to have a full view on the market situation in the Mediterranean area. All the migration flows from south to north pass from here and the MNO’s market penetration in the area reflects this phenomenon.
With the widespread use of smartphones, in these last years we observed the rise of the OTTs concurrence that dramatically eroded margins into the market. As a consequence, MNOs, mainly in NA countries, increased drastically their MTRs. This has triggered a further shift in the user behavior towards alternative and lower-cost solutions with the consequence of a notably worse level of service
2. Which are the most popular Apelby services in this market?
In the last months Apelby has carried out an important plan for the development of new direct interconnections. Now Apelby has edge of having strong direct interconnections with key operators overall into the world.
Some operators have started to use Apelby as a Corridor to terminate their Voice Traffic to the other part of the world taking advantages of competitive costs and direct terminations
Voice Corridors and International Gateways are the most important services in MENA market. Through Voice corridor, operators can terminate their valuable traffic to other markets via using Apelby voice services.
As most of the operators are not willing to expand Voice services it’s convenient for them to consider Apelby as an International gateway to send out their all outbound traffic.
3. What are the most important opportunities on the MENA market in your view?
As mentioned above, international wholesale voice market today is facing stagnation or even a decline due to the increasing market share of OTTs. Therefore, several carriers are dismissing their International/Wholesale departments
In this situation, businesses are even more afraid of losses. These may be caused by fraudulent traffic and various disruptions on local markets.
In light of this, important opportunities are linked to the fraud and market protections.
Fraud protection relates to specific traffic and it provides basically protection against artificially generated calls, mostly originating directly in the network of the retail operator. The objective of fraud protection is the immediate detection and prompt blocking of fraudulent traffic.
This is a common need to all MNOs in NA due to the fact that the high termination cost permits several Interconnection bypass phenomena.
Effective fight against frauds usually requires high investments into staff, technology and SW systems with a 24/7 monitoring. We can help MNOs with important benefits in term of prevention on revenue damages, reduction of CAPEX and OPEX costs for expensive systems.
As regards market protection, we can help our partners in collecting traffic originated from specific foreign markets. We can create specific corridors with preferential rate. This corridor stream allows to create marketing campaign towards end-users and thus increase the overall volumes. It is also a possible way to fight against international voice erosion caused by OTT players.
Main benefits for our partners are due to aggregation of traffic even from smaller players without necessity of increasing interconnections, with the result of increasing revenue coming from traditional retail voice.
Our experience has been really positive and both services have quickly become a clear added value that Apelby provides for its customers. I believe that customers will primarily appreciate our individual approach, solution efficiency and long-term cooperation.
