Poland’s Inea is enjoying 12% annual growth in its revenues and is on track to see them double between 2010 and 2016.
This, according to Pawel Fecko, the company’s sales and customer care director, is in sharp contrast to the country’s telecom market as a whole, which is saturated and posting annual growth of only around 1%.
Speaking in a presentation entitled Addressing future challenges for cablecos in the digital home, Fecko said that Inea currently has 170,00+ residential and 4,000+ business customers and is focused on the west of Poland.
It wants to stay local and sees itself as a telco rather than cable operator.
He identified non-telco revenue opportunities as cloud applications, financial services, e-health, energy and smart/secure home.
Its strategy for the smart market looks at corporate customers, ‘smart city’ and residential customers.
In the case of corporate customers he cited the example of a multi-branch hospital in which Inea is providing electronic data storage.
‘Smart City’ is meanwhile providing cable and wireless access to an entire city, and residential customers are given a range of services.
In the latter case the problem is that customers still need time to understand the services.
Indeed, in summary he said it is still not known how customers will react to new products offered by telcos. Inea must be fast in terms of product offer, not strategy.
Fecko said that Inea is the leading provider of broadband services in the markets it is present in, with a share of 30-40%.
It is an MVNO and has a WiMax network that it plans to upgrade to LTE technology.
