CASE STUDY

In February this year, Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company, du, announced its financial results for the full year of 2024. The 2024 performance exceeded the guidance for the year as revenues grew by 7.3 % and EBITDA margin reached 44.2 %, increasing by 11.6 %. The net profit growth of 49.1 %, reaching a record AED 2.5 billion, underscores the ability to drive both top-line expansion and bottomline improvement.

du’ s repositioning in the market and revenue diversification resulted in 7.3 % revenue growth to reach a revenue of AED 14.6bn. du’ s strategic partnerships with Orange and Telefónica are expected to further boost its innovation and growth in 2025 and ahead.

Explains Fahad Al Hassawi, CEO du,“ This is a result of not just the work of one year. We started the transformation journey from 2021 right after the Covid year when the industry took a big hit. Just like any other industry, we started our transformation project internally and inside this transformation we did many things.”

While other companies were trying to cut cost, du decided with the support of its shareholders and the board, that it was the right thing to invest, especially in the rollout of 5G. To enhance its networks, du chose to invest almost three times more than what it was typically investing every year and continued this investment across three years from 2021 to 2023.

du also chose to reshuffle its operating model. Previously du looked at its potential market in UAE as two major segments, the consumer and the enterprise. du changed this approach to the market and created smaller segments within these two major segments.

It began to approach the UAE market as premium, SME, SOHO, governmental and large account segments. And this helped du to approach its markets in a more focussed and relevant manner.

Another important decision that du took was to simplify the organisation structure of Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company, EITC.

“ We removed layers from the organisation; we increased the span of control; we rotated people around; so, we came out of this as a much lighter, agile organisation than what we used to be before,” explains Al Hassawi.

Having implemented these changes du also focussed on product innovation, customer experience, and the shift from physical to digital. These efforts over the last three years, have resulted in du’ s historic financial performance in 2024.

“ These numbers are the highest since the inception of du,” says Al Hassawi.“ What we see today is the result of this journey, which has been extremely comprehensive.”

Core business and ICT business

Today, global and regional telecom players do not want to depend only on their traditional business which is the network connectivity business. They also want to move to other sources of revenue and growth. Telecom players have been trying to diversify their revenue and du has also adopted the same approach of diversification.“ We are not too different from what many other telcos are trying to do,” says Al Hassawi.

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