We supported a publicly listed Middle Eastern operator with the creation of a five-year corporate business plan to drive budgeting and medium- to long-term strategy

The problem

• A publicly listed Middle Eastern operator active in the mobile, fixed, wholesale and digital markets was looking to support its ambitious revenue and profit growth targets with the creation of a consolidated corporate business plan
  • the plan would enable the operator to monitor the financial and strategic performance of its operating units; identify strategic, commercial and operational initiatives for the next five years; set future performance targets; and translate these targets to a financial plan for stakeholders

The solution

• Our team engaged with each operating unit at various levels to understand performance and identify ongoing initiatives, key strengths and challenges
• We performed an independent assessment of a wide set of relevant telco and digital markets, including more than 40 new and adjacent businesses, to identify market opportunities and threats and constructively challenge long-held internal beliefs about existing markets
• A series of workshops identified and prioritised an extensive list of operating unit initiatives – each one was developed into a financial plan, with key considerations and implementation plan
• A further set of corporate strategic initiatives to tackle new markets (e.g. ICT services) and cross-unit initiatives (e.g. data-centre services) was developed
• Existing and new initiatives were incorporated into a bottom-up business plan, linking financial projection outputs (e.g. revenue and profits) to market and business performance drivers (e.g. market size, market share, price)

Figure: Map of strategic initiatives by ease of implementation, impact

The result

• The study outputs were approved by the Board of Directors and proved instrumental in challenging long-held internal beliefs on existing markets, identifying opportunities for new business and shaping ongoing budget discussions; the five-year business plan tool was handed over to strategy and is now being used as a platform to develop initiatives across the business and to inform the annual budgeting process