Building a corporate strategy to achieve over 20% revenue growth, diversify the portfolio beyond core telecoms and harness AI-driven value creation

“Drawing on our deep expertise in the global telecoms market and a proven approach to corporate strategy, we helped the client define a practical but ambitious path forward – aligning shareholder expectations with new growth opportunities, local and regional market realities as well as disciplined cash flow and P&L outcomes.”

– Sameer Gupta, Principal, Analysys Mason

The challenge

We developed a corporate strategy to drive future revenue growth and operational efficiencies in the context of a saturated core market

An integrated telecoms operator in the Gulf region had undergone multiple strategy cycles over the past 15 years, securing a leading position in its core business. However, the market had since reached saturation, leaving limited scope for further market share growth. Our client’s key aspiration for the upcoming 4-year strategy was to explore new growth areas within and beyond the home market, with particular interest in AI-related opportunities. 

We developed an overall corporate strategy covering growth areas for the consumer, business and wholesale business units as well as key initiatives that would support the company’s transformation into a lean, agile organisation capable of supporting future growth.

Our approach 

Using a comprehensive framework, deep understanding of the global trends across markets, extensive stakeholder engagement and analytical skills, we defined the corporate strategy 

We followed our widely adopted four-step framework, that included developing a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis which covered a detailed review of global market trends and their local market relevance as well as a detailed internal performance review of our client. In addition, aligned with the vision and aspirations of our client’s management and board members, we examined the opportunities that required our client to push boundaries both from a geographical scope and a capabilities perspective.

Throughout the project, we had deep internal engagement with the board members and mid-level management across the organisation to incorporate their perspective. A comprehensive framework was developed to shortlist the most relevant focus areas and covered multiple dimensions including the size of the opportunity, profile and loss (P&L) impact, investment required, internal rate of return (IRR) and commercial/operational risks. We developed a strategy that balances bold ambition with disciplined execution to deliver the shareholder returns.

We provided a 4-year strategy with clearly defined initiatives, activities and milestones, and we aligned the organisation through a series of company wide and business unit workshops.

Figure 1: Defining a clear strategic roadmap to allow for 20% revenue growth over 4 years 

The impact

We delivered a clear corporate strategy aimed at achieving our client’s ambitions over the next 4 years

Backed by detailed business cases, our strategic plan identified priority focus areas for each business segment, targeting over 20% revenue growth and increasing adjacent business contributions to more than 10% over 4 years. We also established a clear AI strategy to boost external monetisation and internal operational efficiency.