The 'long game' with a granular approach

We began building business slowly. Even after launching in Bangladesh and Thailand, our Asian mobile subscriber base remained small, the regulatory environment challenging and there was little to be had in terms of revenues. 

But I can say with absolute certainty that it was all worth it. From Pakistan to Malaysia, we now employ tens of thousands of people manning hundreds of thousands of customer touch-points where everyone can connect with their families, to the world and, we hope, to better futures. 

Our Asia businesses account for half of our global revenues. Our global customer base is approaching 200 million, and we are on track to get 200 million people on the Internet by 2017 – most of them in Asia. Partly because of the services and investments that mobile operators like us bring in, GDPs are rising, new technology sectors are flourishing and household incomes are climbing.

How did we get here? The stories of two people light up a path of lessons for me – everything we’ve built in the last 20 years was constructed for people like them.

 

The woman in Thailand who liked Dtac

In Thailand in the early 2000s, I met a lady while filming a commercial in Chiang Mai. She said she used Dtac because she liked the brand. She didn’t have any idea about what she paid or about the conditions of her plan. She just felt connected to Dtac. She trusted Dtac. 

Trust and emotional connections like this are important to our customers, and you can’t build them if you aren’t as close to your customers, operating on as granular a level as possible. Asia is not Asia, after all. National, provincial and community differences within Asia are even more pronounced than those of Europe. A granular approach must be taken to connect the way a business needs to here. 

This leads me to my second point: to build this level of trust, businesses have to commit long-term to Asia. It’s a region that requires a 20+ year commitment, not two years. We began in the late 1990s in Bangladesh with 90,000 subscribers, and no one thought it would work. After twenty years of playing ‘the long game’, Bangladesh is our largest market with well over more than 50 million subscribers. 

 

The girl on her first telephone call in Myanmar

On the day of our launch in Yangon, I showed a young girl how to use a mobile phone. I will always remember her face when I called her new phone from across the room; it was the first phone call of her life. Initially shy, she began to smile as she spoke with me on the phone. Though this exchange didn’t last long, it brought back to me how much has led up to this one powerful moment – years of preparation, countless hurdles and significant investments.

In Myanmar and in all our Asia markets, you have to be patient and be prepared for the unexpected. Build competences out of failures and be dynamic in the way you work. Learning doesn’t stop once you’ve found success in a market.

This girl’s country is undergoing a social, technological and economic seismic shift the likes of which the world has never seen. And all of the lessons I’ve learned in Asia will serve us well through this overnight evolution – in Myanmar and across all of our markets as we grow and adapt as a company and industry.

Commit to countries long-term. Be present in the market, on the ground with your people. Understand their needs and find ways to stay close to them. Be engaged and responsive to your stakeholders. And build trust in the role you play in advancing societies. Show everybody that you share their vision of a better future and, together, you’ll make it happen.

 

Sigve Brekke is the executive vice president & head of Asia operations and will transition to the role of global CEO for Telenor Group in August.