With a significant presence in the country for over three decades, Nokia continues to drive technological advancements and talent development, supporting the nation's socio-economic growth. Here, Kompella sheds light on Nokia’s strategic initiatives, its contributions to digital infrastructure, and its commitment to fostering local talent.
Nokia’s contribution to Egypt’s digital transformation over the past years
“Nokia has been involved in Egypt for many years – over 30 years from the early days of first GSM and fixed telephony networks to the advent of the internet and the developments of Fiber to the Home and now 5G,” commented Kompella.
Nokia has been a strategic partner and investor in the Egyptian telecom sector, with Nokia Egypt being a main hub for Nokia Middle East and Africa region. “We are honoured to be a strategic partner to all the main telecom players (operators) in the Egyptian market namely, telecom Egypt, Orange, and Vodafone. We are also supporting the public sector and Enterprise sector and vertical industries in their digital transformation journey.”
Conscious of the importance of digital for social and economic development, Egypt has been taking forward-looking steps in digital infrastructure deployments and ensuring no one is left behind in the digital services space. “The Haya Karima Government initiative is an excellent example of such an ambitious project where we are partnering with Telecom Egypt to achieve those goals and bring broadband connectivity to rural Egypt.”
Nokia’s talent development initiatives in Egypt and their significance
“We have created, I would say, a very important hub for us in the Middle East and Africa, here in Egypt. We have a large number of employees and engineers – about 600,” highlighted Kompella.
“We have been serving the region from here for a while, but I think that we are taking a bigger step now and really trying to make this a centre of excellence for us, to serve the community, locally, as well as the Middle East and Africa.”
Over the past three years, Nokia started a program to hire interns and give them some practical training on different technologies. Over 150 students have been taken as interns over the past three years, and we even hired some of them after they graduated. “We are very active in trying to introduce technology in a very practical way – beyond what they learn in school and in university.”
From there, Nokia decided to take a bigger step now and have started focussing on some key technology areas. “Network automation is a very important area now as networks become bigger, and we are depending so much on the networks in everything we do.”
“Humans are not very good at doing repetitive jobs, over and over. So, to take care of these routine jobs, one can create an automation platform. We want to teach these students to learn automation technologies, how to use them, and how to make the methods more reliable. That’s one very big area that is becoming relevant all over the world, and we thought we would like to focus on that as a specific technology area.”
“The other area we are focusing on is data centres, as with the rise of AI, data centre technologies have come to the forefront. Learning them has become very important, and that’s why we are trying to create a centre of learning – so that we can bring that kind of technology here. We have seen very bright kids here who can pick up these technologies, and I really think that we can prepare them for these keys to success in the future, here in Egypt, even if we won’t be able to hire everyone.”
“We want to set up this learning centre and create the environment that would enable us to bring these technologies, that are in high demand in Egypt and the whole MEA region, and introduce the students to them in a very practical way.”
“We can even serve Europe, because it is sometimes really expensive to do projects in Europe with European talent, so it is an opportunity for us to build more ties and use the skills that are here in Egypt.”
Enhancing digital infrastructure in Egypt through the EU Global Gateway
Kompella added “The Global Gateway is the EU’s investment plan for sustainable infrastructure in developing economies. The aim is to bridge the existing infrastructure investment gap enabling the green and digital transition, by relying on public financing to leverage private capital and investment for robust projects that deliver on key public policy objectives. The EU plans to finance sustainable and trusted infrastructure projects and enable favourable regulatory and business environments to facilitate investments in developing economies.”
As a trusted European partner for digitalization, Nokia works together with private and public partners, including through the EU’s Global Gateway initiative, to develop trusted and sustainable connectivity - to have high impact and benefit countries, industries and communities. “Nokia is member of the Global Gateway Business Advisory Group and currently the chair of its digital subgroup.”
“We are promoting Digitalization and sustainability as priority topics for the Global gateway, and, creating opportunities for the public sector to co-finance broadband deployments, submarine cables and other critical telco infrastructure projects. Digitalization of energy, transport, logistics hubs, mining, health and education present an excellent opportunity to be also explored.”
“Digitalisation helps you to, first of all, be more efficient, in order to scale up and grow. The other thing is that it helps green initiatives. We want to use the Global Gateway as a way for us to bring these technologies to Egypt, and really participate in its growth.”
Nokia's role and contribution in investments in Telco infrastructure and critical communication networks to support digital transformation and socio-economic development.
“We know from COVID times how important networks have become to us, in terms of communication. It’s very important for everyone to have connectivity, so we are very active in making sure that important projects like fiberisation are bringing the technology to all parts of the country.”
“In particular, we have looked at the telco infrastructure as becoming mission-critical in all areas. Previously we would look at things like utilities, railway signalling, and public safety. These are mission-critical areas, and we have built products that really serve these fields very well, and we have invested a lot and are widely known in the industry for our mission-critical products that are highly secure with great performance and quality.”
“Now, I think that everything has become mission-critical, because even something like your broadband connection has become mission-critical. If you don’t have it, you don’t have the ability to talk to your loved ones, to have an education, to do online-shopping. The network has become mission-critical in all domains.”
“That’s why investing not just in certain areas like utilities, transportation, mining, logistics, or public safety, has become crucial. These are very important industries that require very reliable infrastructure, but I think that everything today requires that. That is the reason we are putting a lot of investment into our routers, switches, data centre products, mobile technology, and optical technologies.”
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