COVERAGE YOU CAN COUNT ON
Bringing 4G to nearly the entirety of Portugal and boosting its operational KPIs, market share, and customer base, Altice entered 2019 with robust expectations.
BIOGRAPHY
With over 20 years of professional experience, Alexandre Fonseca has been CEO of Altice Portugal since 2017. He is also the Executive Manager for Altice Labs, the Portuguese-based technology research & development unit for Altice Group. He joined Altice in 2012, when the group entered Portugal. Previously, he was the CEO at ONI Portugal and ONI Mozambique, prior to which he was the CTO at Cabovisão. Between 1995 and 2007, he worked in the IT and telecommunications industries in senior management and management consulting positions for Coopers & Lybrant, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and IBM. He holds a bachelor’s in computer science engineering from Lisbon University and a master's degree in sales and marketing management from TeamView Institute.What have been the main highlights since you were appointed as the company's CEO?
Altice was known as PT before it was acquired in 2015. One of the most important things for us with the new team was to change the way we were communicating or being perceived in the market. We increased our levels of communication and recognition in the market since we are leaders in almost every segment of the industry. That was one of the key challenges we tackled, nine months after which our recognition and communication levels showed tremendous improvements. On a more business-related level, we faced continuing and new challenges. Since 2015, the company has invested heavily in infrastructure for fiber-optic deployment and mobile network enhancement, and continues to invest in infrastructure development.
The mobile sector is being led by MEO with 7.9 million out of 10.3 million mobile customers. What is your strategy?
Altice's key strategy is to maintain a high ratio of investment in infrastructure because overall growth cannot be achieved unless we invest heavily in infrastructure development. Altice Portugal is the number-one investor with EUR1.2 billion invested over the last three fiscal years. It is due to our investments that our mobile network can cover 98.5% of the Portuguese population with 4G, a high number for European standards. Equally important, the same infrastructure enables 70% coverage for next generation 4G+ services; however, we want to be recognized not just for our investments in infrastructure but also for our high quality of service. To that end, we are enhancing customer experience and driving initiatives that allow people to have self-service and digital approaches to customer service interactions. In addition to that, our initiatives are focused on providing the best content, applications, and solutions for the B2B market; we aim to create a system that can be scaled for large enterprises and SMEs. Portugal's business segment is largely comprised of small companies, so we cannot simply replicate a service offered to a major Portuguese bank for a small accounting shop.
Altice is working with Huawei to make Portugal the European 5G leader. What can your customers expect from Altice in this regard?
We have divided the country into north and south and are working with Huawei in the south and Ericsson in the north. With both of them, we have established two individual programs, collectively named the Road to 5G. The project has a head start, as the current infrastructure covers 70% of the Portuguese population with 4G+, paving the path for an easy transition to 5G. We are now experimenting with technologies and CPEs with Huawei. Notably, we conducted the first live demo with live 5G equipment in 1H2018, and it was a huge success. The company is looking forward to the implementation of 5G on a national level. However, we are not as eager to implement 5G as regulators, governments, or technology manufacturers because we invested around EUR100 million in modernizing our mobile network in 2016 and first need to capitalize on that. We see 5G as a natural evolution that will come along in time and do not expect to have live commercial services before 2022. 5G is not about having more capacity—4G is sufficient for present demands—but about addressing a different set of challenges, such as density and the number of devices that can be connected within 1sqkm. I do not expect 5G to be massive for retail customers; it will be a good evolution for new sets of businesses that would incorporate the Internet of Things and Machine to Machine communication.
COVERAGE YOU CAN COUNT ON
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Focus: Community of Portuguese Language Speaking Countries
Making an Impact
Established in 1996, the Community of Portuguese Language Speaking Countries (CPLP) is a mechanism geared at linking and sharing the experience of Lusophone countries. Besides Portugal, this includes Brazil, Portugal, Cape Verde, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and São Tomé and Príncipe.
read articleFocus
Don’t Mind the Disruption
Having won the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest, Lisbon hosted the 2018 event. The relevance? Well, the contest began back in 1956 as a showcase not only of song, but of then-nascent live television broadcast technology. Today, Portugal is on the cutting edge of new technological developments.
read articleInterview
João Pedro Soeiro de Matos Fernandes , Minister , Environment and Energy Transition
The Ministry for the Environment and Energy Transition is focusing on decarbonizing the economy, valuing the territory and its habitats, and striving for a more circular use of the country's resources.
read articleInterview
António Braz Costa , General Manager, Portuguese Technological Centre for the Textile & Clothing Industries (CITEVE)
CITEVE has transformed the industry by promoting value addition, adopting the latest technologies, and ensuring the highest standards of environmental sustainability.
read articleFocus: New airport
Right Time to Seize Missed Opportunities
Portugal has seen its air traffic figures increase by as much as 80% in the last five years. As a result, its transportation infrastructure, and Lisbon's airport in particular, cannot cope with the rising numbers. A new airport project that will turn a military base into a commercial airport is now under discussion to bring much-needed relief to air traffic.
read articleInterview
Germano de Sousa , President, Grupo Germano de Sousa
Grupo Germano de Sousa's success can best be summed up by its understanding that science and medicine only really progress when technological development is combined with a deeper respect for human values and professional ethics.
read articleInterview
Isabel Capeloa Gil , Rector, Universidade Católica
Having pioneered the introduction of multiple subject areas to Portugal's tertiary education scene, Universidade Católica is aspiring to establish the country's first private medical school and introduce cutting-edge digital transformation.
read articleInterview
Carlos Guillén Gestoso , President, Escola Universitária de Ciências Empresariais, Saúde, Tecnologias e Engenharia & President, Atlantica University
Atlantica University differentiates through its company-university model and an MBA program in partnership with the University of California, Berkley, among other initiatives, to produce practical theoreticians.
read articleFocus: Public teaching staff
An Age-old Problem
Over a decade of austerity measures combined with an ageing population have seen the average age of the Portuguese public teaching staff progressively climb to one of the highest in the OECD. With frozen salaries, an extended retirement age, and precarious working conditions, today the sector faces one of its biggest challenge yet.
read articleInterview
Pedro Queiroz , General Manager, Federation of the Portuguese Agri-Food Industry (FIPA)
Portugal's economic recovery has seen its F&B sector emerge with annual turnovers of EUR16 billion, thanks to FIPA's undeterred focus on stable policies, excellent nutrition standards, and sustainability.
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