CedarCom on the Future of the Company and Business Sector
The Ministry recently permitted CedarCom to sell 3G services on smartphones. The agreement that was signed with the Ministry in 2012 had two phases: phase 1 was for dongles and tablets and phase 2 was for smartphones. This was just approved a few weeks ago and it will go into implementation in the next few months.
Imad Tarabay, CEO of CedarCom discusses the future of the company and the business sector in Lebanon. Tarabay states, “Ecommerce won´t grow too much in Lebanon unless parts of the regulations also change to permit electronic signatures. As soon as that happens you will see good growth. Hosting and cloud solutions are at the infant stages and so they should continue growing.” Recently, a 400 million dollar fund was created by the Central Bank to help entrepreneurs and start-ups. This will have a good impact on the IT and knowledge industry and you will start seeing the impact in a year or two. Furthermore, we see that there is a lot of growth happening on the corporate side. Last year growth in the corporate sector was close to 35%. “In our case in particular we will have a lot of growth in retail, now that we have started offering DSL and we will start packaging bundles of DSL and 3G services.”