IN DISCUSSION WITH
STARHUB’S EXECUTIVES
CHIEF EXECUTIVE
NIKHIL EAPEN
It has been a couple of months since you assumed your new role as CEO of StarHub. What are your top priorities, and should we expect a major shift in strategy for the company?
It is my honor to take on this role and lead StarHub. We have an exceptional, driven team that is passionate about our company, our customers and our community, and I am privileged to work with them to take StarHub to the next level.
We do not intend to change our strategy significantly – our transformation strategy is the right strategy and our team has delivered on our transformation targets. My goal is to drive our execution and roadmap, accelerate our delivery cadence and raise the bar on our aspiration.
We have built our strategy across all lines of our business centered around digitalisation. We have moved forward on every metric across digital sales, digital conversions and digital processes. We intend to accelerate and double down on our digital initiatives.
On the Consumer side of our business, we want to empower our customers with a unique digital gateway through which they access StarHub’s rich portfolio of connectivity, content and lifestyle products and build the packages that match their wants and needs. We are applying a similar approach for our Enterprise business, empowering our large corporate and mid-market customers to digitally manage their own virtualised network, driving their own cloud and digital transformations.
Concurrently, we continue to evaluate and explore synergistic M&A opportunities that accelerate this strategy, expand our markets and enable greater innovation and diversification for StarHub.
In summary, we will build upon the strong momentum to continue executing our strategy with digital at the core of our roadmap. This will allow us to accelerate our transformation and expand our growth aspirations. We look forward to share more about our next phase of this strategy at an opportune time.
You have background in global ICT and investment banking. How do you intend to drive growth for the business, through an M&A strategy or otherwise?
The last year has been difficult across countries and communities, but a milestone year for technology adoption. COVID-19 has accelerated digitalisation across markets, with customers dramatically onboarding cloud-based solutions that enable digital workspaces and agile and distributed work practices, with efficiency, security and connectivity being paramount. We launched 5G non-standalone (“NSA”) services in 2020 and we expect to swing into full 5G adoption in 2021. In combination, cloud technology and 5G will truly enable enterprises to harvest value from concrete Internet of Things (“IoT”) strategies, and IoT devices and platforms across their businesses.
We intend to leverage momentum from these growth drivers – cloud, 5G, IoT – all of which are interlinked. Enterprises need to connect to their Cloud and SaaS service provider from remote locations, with a distributed workforce, harvesting data from thousands of edge devices, in turn creating demand for new cloud workloads and data-driven solutions. This makes ultra high-speed connectivity and high-quality network infrastructure so important. We intend to deliver our network connectivity via a digital platform that is effectively virtualised, with propositions and solutions that enable enterprises to fulfil and control and bring together their cloud workloads, applications, devices and people.
Our journey is underway. We launched our 5G IoT proposition in early 2021, in partnership with Software AG, designed for mass adoption and delivered as a service. With the multiplicity of connected devices and the capabilities and efficiencies 5G brings, we expect enterprises to move to the next phase of gathering and applying data to drive business growth. We intend to do much more with partners and customers in the evolving 5G ecosystem.
Our M&A strategy is supported by a rigorous research-driven selection and evaluation process delivered by a strong and experienced team. Our Cybersecurity and Regional ICT Services segments have added revenue growth while enhancing our Enterprise focus with new capabilities and broader addressable market. A case in point is our acquisition of Strateq in July 2020. Strateq is a data-driven business solutions and information and communications technology (ICT) company, which plays to higher growth data-driven trends across larger regional markets. Strateq’s addition strengthened our internal capabilities in the areas of cloud, data centers and data analytics. We would like to realise more acquisitions like Strateq; adding companies which establish growth beachheads for our Enterprise aspirations in Singapore and the region.