Having recently been appointed CEO of Telecom Egypt, how does your professional experience position you to lead the company during a period of rapid change in digital and global connectivity?
My career has included posts in multinational corporations and investment firms across sectors including both telecoms and the likes of financial technology and services, real estate and mining. This has given me experience in a variety of areas, applicable to a communications world that increasingly demands a multifaceted, multisectoral approach.
Among my experiences in the telecoms field, I spent many years at the former Orascom Telecom, where my roles included leading strategic transformation and diversification, as well as overseeing mobile operations across many different regions.
More recently, I’ve been involved in telecoms consultancy, while earlier in my career I held leadership roles at AT&T and Lucent. While the pace of change in the industry has accelerated dramatically, these forward-looking positions have given me valuable experience to navigate today’s era of rapid digital transformation.
What are your key priorities for the coming year in the international and wholesale segment?
My key aim this year is to support the execution of Telecom Egypt’s organisational transformation programme – an initiative approved by the Board to enhance strategic focus, operational agility and customer-centricity across the company, positioning it to adapt rapidly to today’s market demands.
Within the international and wholesale segment, we’re continuing to invest strategically to strengthen and broaden our network infrastructure, expand our international partnerships, and enhance the performance and scalability of our core operations. By focusing on high-impact projects and new growth opportunities with strong return potential, we’ll support the company’s goal of translating growth into stronger financial results.
Leveraging Egypt’s strategic geographic position and our subsea cable ecosystem, we also aim to cement the country’s role as a regional hub for digital connectivity and innovation.
In parallel, our commercial operations have been streamlined into Consumer and Enterprise sectors, creating a sharper focus and alignment across the business. Supported by these structural reforms and a stable macroeconomic environment, we expect revenue growth on the high-single-digit-percentage scale in 2026.
Above all, my goal is to uphold Telecom Egypt’s proud legacy of being the country’s wholesale market leader while steering it confidently into the digital future.
How do Telecom Egypt’s current and upcoming subsea projects strengthen the country’s role as a regional and global connectivity hub?
The work we’re continuously carrying out to expand our international subsea cables is helping to enhance our position as a hub connecting East and West.
This makes our role increasingly important amid the continuing digital transformation and AI-driven growth worldwide, with the sheer scale and proportion of traffic we carry showing Telecom Egypt’s position at the centre of the global stage. Today, more than 90% of international traffic transiting between Europe and Asia, and Europe and Africa, passes through our infrastructure, while our transit capacity has now reached more than 300Tbps.
The last seven months of 2025 saw some major milestones, with the completion of some major projects in which Telecom Egypt is involved, further paving the way forward for global connectivity. These included the landmark completion of the core infrastructure for the 2Africa cable, reinforcing our role as a primary gateway connecting Africa with the rest of the world.
Other highlights involved the finalisation of the laying of the Coral Bridge system connecting Egypt and Jordan, and the completion of the two landings and the crossing routes for the SEA-ME-WE 6 subsea system.
Separately, we also signed an agreement with PCCW Global, Sparkle and Zain Omantel International to collaborate on building the Asia-Africa-Europe-2 [AAE-2] cable.
How do the company’s consortium and partnership-based projects reflect its collaborative approach to infrastructure development?
Partnerships are a fundamental pillar of our strategy for developing international infrastructure. They allow different players to bring their strengths and coverage to the table, while enabling us to optimise the value of our assets and expand our global reach. In total, we currently partner with more than 170 subsea players across 21 in-service and planned cable systems – a current estimate that extends through 2028.
Homing in on one crucial example, the completion of the core 2Africa infrastructure is a direct result of the culmination of years of close collaboration – not only with a wide range of global operators, but also with regulators and policymakers. Directly connecting East and West Africa in a continuous system for the first time, this project would not have been possible on such a scale without these partnerships.
Acting as a showcase for the benefits of collaboration, the cable, which lands in more than 30 countries already and links Africa to the Middle East, Asia and Europe, will help enable connectivity for 3 billion people. It’s expected to provide a boost of up to $37 billion to Africa’s GDP, while fostering entrepreneurship and innovation, and meeting fast-growing demand for AI, cloud and high-bandwidth applications.
Another major consortium project, the AAE-2 cable, aims to establish a robust next-generation subsea digital link connecting Hong Kong and Singapore to Italy via high-capacity terrestrial corridors across Thailand, the Arabian Peninsula and Egypt. This initiative will help create a new future-proof digital highway between three continents, offering a geographically diverse, resilient and high-performance route for international traffic that integrates both subsea and terrestrial infrastructure.
What do the other subsea projects you cited bring to the table?
Together, the implementation and completion of these projects are substantially boosting international connectivity across multiple regions, at a time of accelerating demand for global capacity and resilience. Following the conclusion of several initiatives in quick succession, one of their key contributions will be in jointly driving the next wave of growth in AI and cloud services.
Demonstrating the strength of cross-border partnerships, in Jordan, Telecom Egypt worked with leading ICT player NaiTel, the telecoms arm of Aqaba Digital Hub, to roll out the Coral Bridge. As the first direct subsea cable between the two countries in more than a quarter of a century, this infrastructure provides a high-fibre-count digital link, strengthening regional resilience, reducing latency and providing onward connectivity across Asia, Africa and Europe.
For the SEA-ME-WE 6 cable, Telecom Egypt completed two landings last year – one in Port Said on the Mediterranean coast and the other in Ras Ghareb on the Red Sea. In addition, we enabled the connection between the landing points by providing resilient terrestrial crossing routes.
Providing a new, diverse route between Southeast Asia and Europe, this initiative highlights another core strength of Telecom Egypt’s offering in its ability to deliver seamless links between seas along key intercontinental routes.
Furthermore, the physical diversity we offer across our network is complemented by digital innovation enabled through our WeConnect platform, which provides customers with unprecedented agility in ordering cross-connections, rerouting traffic and optimising capacity across multiple subsea and terrestrial paths.
What message would you like to share with Capacity Middle East attendees and your international partners?
We’re at a pivotal stage in the evolution of the international communications market, where industry players need to align their strategies to capture the next wave of rapid growth. By doing so collectively, we stand to gain from the immense opportunities emerging across digital transformation, cloud and AI, supported by secure and intelligent infrastructure.
In this context, Egypt and the rest of the Middle East will be central to this growth, acting as a bridge between continents and a driving force behind the next generation of digital services. The region also has the resources and momentum to accelerate development in neighbouring markets with surging potential, such as Africa, where enhanced infrastructure, including the recently completed 2Africa cable, is already paving the way for broader regional integration.
Ultimately, as I’ve already mentioned, maximising this potential will depend on close collaboration among operators, ecosystem partners, governments and regulators to shape a unified long-term vision for the future of global connectivity. By working together and combining our strengths, we can lay the foundations for resilient, adaptive infrastructure that empowers the next generation of telcos, enterprises and entrepreneurs.
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