Interview with Louis Diakité, Chief Executive Officer of Alink Telecom

What is your assessment of the ICT sector at the moment? Do you think that since 2011 and 2012, the sector has changed or liberalized itself? Is it moving in the right direction?

Speaking about Côte d'Ivoire, we have moved ahead by gaining renewed submarine cables, which is wax. We also have the ACE cable coming in. Yet the sector remains monopolized by two groups, Orange and MTN. It would be a positive step ahead for the government to liberalize such businesses and to give opportunity to anyone else who wants to build their own submarine cables or to be the fiber infrastructural operator, who has the ability to invest in this sector.

Do you think the government is moving in the right direction? The Minister recently talked of huge developmental projects in different sectors where ICT has an impact. He thinks that “the main challenge is to develop the content now,” and by content he means for instance in case of education, it’s interconnecting universities, so the teachers can talk and teach directly in all different universities; in health, it is to bring about a convergent security sector; in case of necessary papers, you don’t need to move back to your village to get your papers; in agriculture, it is to bring about a change between different kinds of agriculture; in law, to be move transparent so that all decisions are made available to the international community on internet. Do you think content development is the next challenge that the ICT sector and the government are facing?

What you mentioned above is the view of the government; that is their planning as regards to where they want to go. However the infrastructure is not yet available to establish international connections and to really have a good mapping of the countries. So today there are just two infrastructural licenses, which are given to MTN and Orange. They are the same, they both deal with mobiles and they have the necessary infrastructure; they have everything. Orange controls 2 submarine cables (Ace & SAT3) and develops National Fiber Optic Network and now MTN as well with WACS as Submarine cable also develops National Fiber Optic Network. I think it will be relevant for the government to open such sectors, to enable several operators to come and invest in the infrastructure. That will be just for the benefit of the people of Côte d'Ivoire, because then they will have multiple connectivity to cities and villages and so on. I don’t think it is the duty of the government to invest in such kind of infrastructure, but they just have to open it and to help promote what we see happening in Ghana today - decreases in prices, complete mapping of the country, etc.

If you take the example of some developed countries in Europe, there may be hundreds infrastructural companies. Hundreds of them in one country, because it’s open to any investor to come in and invest. If you want to rent a link between Paris and London, you have at least a hundred companies to assist you with that. Thus, it’s very important for us to have the ability to invest in the infrastructure and to expand our infrastructure; then we will have the content. The content is already an issue, but we need an infrastructure in place to handle that. Also, when you have a private monopoly, as we have today between MTN and Orange for the fiber network, the prices are very high in that case, which consequently discourages a lot of businesses from improving their rentability and the expectation and delivering the content. I wish our government will take this option of opening the content to any cable operators or any company that wants to invest in infrastructural development.

Alink Telecom is present in 15 countries in Africa and your main clients are continental companies that have, like you, presence in different countries. What are your major priorities in development? What are you doing at the moment? Tell us a little bit more about the international hub that you have created.

Because of the free-zone attractiveness of Côte d'Ivoire, we decided to invest in an international satellite hub in Côte d'Ivoire, which will cover the whole of Africa, giving broadband connectivity around the continent. This has only been possible because of the right view of the government to emphasize on the need of the free-zone to be like a technology village, which is very important for a country like ours. From that hub, we can broadcast to the entire African continent. That’s one of our major implementations that has just been launched.

Could you please share more information on how you are going to consolidate the MPLS network?

For some time the control point for our MPLS network will, unfortunately, be Ghana. Why? Because in Ghana, it’s completely open to any submarine or terrestrial cable. Therefore, you are connected to all international players. When we say international, it means the link between Africa and Europe is established, contrary to what we have in Côte d'Ivoire today. Thus, that’s the reason why it is wise for us to have our main control center in Ghana. Yet the redundancy will be done with Côte d'Ivoire and we wish Côte d'Ivoire to open for this project, which means reducing the access cost that we are incurring today, which will in turn improve the profitability of our business and give us the option to move our control center from Ghana to the free-zone in Côte d'Ivoire.

What we really wish to do is to expand and be present as an MPLS operator in all Western and Central African countries. Therefore our next step is to have full coverage of Central and Western Africa before really following suit in Eastern Africa. We recently opened business in two new countries. Now Alink is in 15 countries and we still expect to open a new one in a new country. Morocco is on our top list, because we want to really densify our African fiber network.

What does this mean for the clients? What are the benefits that you identify with that? Is it reducing the cost? What competitive advantages do you have in providing solutions compared to other companies?

The benefit of this kind of network is the effectiveness of the network. Today, if you want to establish communication between Côte d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso, you need a highway. Today in Europe, they are talking about fiber energy, whereas we are still struggling to access energy. Having this highway in place will reduce time for applications like banking, or any type of client-service architecture that will benefit from the reduced time between point A and point B. At the end of the day, this means faster processing time. When you get to the bank, you won’t have to queue before getting any information. It will be more instantaneous. Today the average in our region is still beyond 240 milliseconds. With MPLS and fiber network, we will get up to 40 milliseconds and a maximum of 60 milliseconds. This means that it will be at least four times faster than it is today.

Could you elaborate on the value-added services such as computing and mobile banking?

Once you have the infrastructure in place, we can speak about content, because there is no content without infrastructure. After getting the infrastructure or the MPLS in place, we will bring in SAP as content. SAP is one of the leading manufacturers of integrated software called ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning). We are bringing in SAP on a cloud-computing basis; you will just pay the user. In order to supply SAP on a cloud-computing basis, you need a very reliable and fast link to your main server, because here several customers are sharing the same application, so everyone will be accessing the same application. Therefore, it’s important to provide reliable and fast access to the server.

One other content we have is mobile-banking application. We provide mobile banking by working with the original bank. In this field we have presence in 12 countries today. We run the mobile-banking application as an ASP (Application Service Provider). We have one central point and they will all be connected to that central point for the mobile-banking process. So this is also only available if you have reliable connectivity. Today our goal is to bundle “access” and “content” into one package and to deliver it as a package.

Another of our trade avenues is an e-commerce platform, which will only be reserved as a B2B bond. We will just supply it as a B2B bond to give access to vendor and supplier to interact and to carry out automatic transaction, which is real-time transaction and then to be interconnected for clearance with the banks, to do real-time settlement system.

Would you reveal the name of the bank? Has the contract not yet been signed?

I don’t wish to reveal it right now. The bank is engaged. Just like SAP, we have also a signed human resource application on cloud-computing basis with a big hotel. Maybe it is better not to reveal the identity of our customers.

Could you elaborate on the last point you mentioned about agricultural exchange?

It’s called agri-exchange platform. We have a closed network, where there are registered vendors and crop sellers. Then we have the third party, which is the warehouse. A vendor has to bring in his crops to the third party, which is the warehouse. Once the good is in the warehouse, it is weighed and its quality is assessed and it is automatically put on display to all international buyers. They can make online payment using their mobile or internet. They will be able to buy within one second. The goods are delivered using logistics. All agricultural goods available in the country are put on sale, whereby we are mainly speaking about medium-size producers, who should have access to a wider and open market.

This kind of system is suitable for Côte d'Ivoire. Could it have a wider reach?

We have a plan in place with PanAAC (PAN African National Organization). This project is under PanAAC (PAN African Agriculture and Agribusiness Consortium). The head office of PanAAC is in Nairobi, Kenya. We wish to extend it to all countries with a PanAAC base. PanAAC is already present in 37 countries in Africa.

How do you distinguish yourself from your competitors?

We are more flexible. We are still an engineering-based company. We are more effective in design, implementation, in operation of a specific global network. Our group’s highly developed skills of supplying services help us to get access to global networks. Customers are coming to us instead of going to the national operators or the competitors, because of the quality of service we can provide to them. This is mainly because of our skill and because we are a technical entity with a good technical background.

What are the major challenges that you face? What steps do you think you have to take to tackle these obstacles?

Our goal today is to build up a fiber ring across all of West Africa, with Côte d'Ivoire as the main control center for fiber. We are struggling to get an authorization across the country or to provide service within the country — that is the reason why our telecom sector is not open today. I think that will reduce the capacity of the region to really develop, because they are still keeping authorization rights to themselves. They want to protect their interests without giving access to development.

Finally, what is your vision for the company’s growth? Where do you see yourself in the next two years? What are your development plans? How difficult is it for you to always be abreast of the latest technology?

Our vision for the whole group is to really densify our network. It is to quickly open an office in Morocco and to really expand over the whole of Central African countries and to be present everywhere across West and Central Africa. We want to extend our network to all those countries. We want to be the sole point for immediate interconnection in all those countries. This is really our goal. Why Morocco? This is because there is an increase in investments from Moroccan companies in West and Central Africa. Therefore there is a need to establish a link with Morocco in order to create a global integrity and interconnection. That has created a new market, which is a substantial one. We also want to go to Algeria, which is next in our plan, and to Tunisia, too.

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