Speaking with Alex Mugane on the positioning of Kenya in the region and the globe was an eye opening experience which enriched the depth of understanding on the development of telecommunication and technology plays in this emerging country. Powered by a genuine passion and interest for the industry, Alex clearly strives to deliver HGC’s value to his customers wherever he goes and so he is the epitome of, “go ahead, we’ve got your back”. Joining the telecommunication industry since 2003 as his first job, Alex holds the strong vision that the industry can bring about positive changes in the lifestyle of the market he operates. Today Alex happily reiterates the trends of frictionless online experiences in terms of retail, banking, education and the workplace to allow people higher integration, productivity and efficiency.
On introducing Kenya, he points out its distinct differentiation of beneficial government regulations that has served to make it an economy able to absorb advanced technological implications. Representing Kenya’s comparable high involvement and high adaptability is its use of 5G networks in the region. Today Kenya has a 91% penetration of mobile subscriptions compared to Africa’s 80%. A brilliant statistic which makes it as good as any other advanced nation with unlimited access to connectivity. What drives this high performance is its comprehensive fibre connectivity and campaigns to push the use of new technology. It is endowed with successes in advanced solutions in the area of IoT, 5G edge computing and OTT. And so Alex points out that Africa is actually doing fair compared to the rest of the world.
In implementing HGC’s unique value of its global reach, it has assisted business in Kenya to further develop into a cosmopolitan by connecting globally. When speaking on this in terms of GDP growth as contributed by ICT, Kenya is the only country in East Africa that has made it to the top 10 GDP in the African region as of 2021. It currently has expansive coverage in the rest of the globe such as USA, Europe, Middle East and Asia including mainland China. This is made possible by the capability of generating value for the customer through promoting the right solutions and services. Alex points out his most important job is to listen to the needs and wants of the customer and to identify available resources ahead of its time for timely delivery as to lose no sales. Extending beyond Kenya, one of the proudest projects which Alex recalls is HGC rolling out SD-WAN in Uganda to deliver secure, reliable and wide coverage network as to benefit more people in the region.
In order to keep up with a track record of success, Alex faces challenges with a confident and industrious responsiveness as he constantly looks for upgrades and provides solutions even when projects get difficult. Entrenching important relationships, a lot of Alex’s success is seen to be a result of good relations with local partners. This is because HGC is the provider of global connectivity and routing path to the end user. But without a local partner is like having the last piece of the puzzle missing. The local partner is meant to provide the local loop which reaches the end customer in their home city. A case in point is a connection project between mainland China and Kenya which demanded a layer 2 cloud connection which can only be provided with a partner on the ground.
Like all visionaries, Alex has strategic goals and a stomach for what the future might hold. Striding into the next step he is looking into development in particularly cloud, edge and more sophisticated IoT services for industries such as agriculture, banking and medical amongst many others as quoted. In the future, Alex is determined to tap into the market growth with the potential of OTT customers which is attractive to the regional market. By entering into Africa, the business ecosystem is facilitating entrepreneurial and business growth of a seller and buyer platform that has also helped to integrate ambitious youth. With recent OTT giants looking for investment in South Africa start up, this trend will see HGC’s strategic goal to support expansion of their presence in Africa.
Also to be visible to both the likes of audiences and customers will be HGC’s goal to further partner with the right information and communication technology (ICT) in the under tapped East and Central Africa. ICT is a real driver of productivity thus Gross Domestic Produce (GDP) growth in emerging nations like Africa. Positive trends and correlations of ICT and GDP growth is seen with a one percentage point increase in the telecom index usage raises real per capital growth by 0.02 for the panel of whole countries. It is expected that ICT continues to have a positive correlation with economic performance indicators.
