This year has been nothing short of transformational for several public and private enterprises across the region and the rest of the world. The wholesale industry, in particular, had a unique experience throughout the pandemic, as people were forced into lockdown and began to study and work from home, causing a huge surge in internet traffic.
At this year’s Telecom Review Leaders’ Summit, the industry’s first hybrid 5G-powered event, Vaneet Mehta, associate vice president and region head, Middle East, Central Asia & Africa, Tata Communications was interviewed by a Telecom Review journalist, to discuss and comment on the wholesale industry amid the pandemic and his very own experience at the summit this year.
This year proved to be an immensely difficult year for multiple industries, including tech and telecoms, could you tell us how the wholesale and capacity industry has been affected and what has been done since in terms of recovery?
The wholesale industry was affected in a positive way even though it was a very tough time for the overall industry for a variety of verticals, aviation being hit the hardest, followed by retail because of the lockdowns we had. However, since most people were at home, more content was being browsed and accessed online. They also had to access their office applications in a secure way- so all that is the core DNA of what we do at Tata Communications. We were very successful when it came to quickly transforming ourselves as we were in a position to do so and hence ensure our employees work from home in a secure and connected way.
When it comes to enterprises that we serve here, we had the social responsibility at the Tata Group to make sure that we internally had a secure digital workplace at home; we also had to figure out how fast and how well we could help enterprises bounce back into business. This pretty much helped us throughout the year and, despite the fluctuation in our stock prices throughout the pandemic, markets have really responded well to our work and we have been quite successful during this time.
What has your experience been like at the telecom review summit this year?
Hats off and congratulations to Toni Eid and the Telecom Review team for pulling off our industry’s first physical event of 2020. I have not been to many digital events during this time but I can say that Telecom Review has really done a fantastic job of setting up and organizing a hybrid event and getting the relevant audience back and connected.
Remaining connected is very important, it is key for our industry because we learn from each other no matter how much we compete on the ground. While the competition is high in our industry, we all compliment eachother’s service offerings because at the end of the day, all the telecom industry’s players all have a common objective which is to serve our customers, implement connectivity from an enterprise standpoint and to basically adapt ourselves to the dynamically and fast-changing needs of the end-users which also ultimately translates into customer experience while indirectly contributing to the monetization of our assets.
