How Telecom Argentina plans to grow in the B2B segment

Telecom Argentina plans to continue growing rapidly in the B2B segment with the offering of digital solutions and private networks.

Currently, 50% of the monthly business generated by the segment corresponds to cybersecurity, IoT and cloud, B2B director Leonardo Coca told a press conference on Tuesday that was held at the Telecom SummiT event. "The challenge is to start growing in everything that is artificial intelligence," he said.

Telecom opened an office in Chile last year to boost its business in that market, and from Argentina it currently serves Paraguay, Colombia and Mexico, Coca said in response to a question from BNamericas regarding its regional footprint.

The company plans to expand the offering of solutions internationally, including IoT, SD-WAN and all types of solutions that do not require network infrastructure, he said.

In Argentina, Telecom has more than 200,000 B2B clients in verticals, including the pharmaceutical, banking, oil and gas, energy and technology sectors. Most of the B2B clients are SMEs, and around 15,000 are corporate and public sector clients that require specialized teams and the company has begun a transformation of its B2B unit to create such teams. 

Regarding its traditional telecom services, Coca said the company will focus only on maintaining the business with the expectation of "vegetative" growth, except for some segments such as SD-WAN that offer significant growth potential.

PRIVATE NETWORKS AND 5G

Telecom develops private 4G business networks for its clients and the plan is to do it with 5G in some future use cases. “Currently we have 20 private network projects and three have been implemented,” Coca said in response to a question from BNamericas about the 4G networks.

Last week Argentina launched its spectrum tender call for 5G services, but received criticism from the country's three operators who see difficulties in participating in the auction as it is currently designed.

During SummIT, Telecom CEO Roberto Nobile said the company is preparing its core network for 5G and expects to have it ready by the end of 2024.

STARTUP SUPPORT

Telecom also announced the offering of free solutions for customers, in a model where users can access the main features of an application for free and later pay to gain access to more capabilities. For this model, the company is seeking startups that provide different types of software and expects to close the year with 30 partners.

"We saw a huge need at companies in Argentina, mainly for software, which has to increase," said Coca about the startup market. "We are achieving two things: that all our clients receive added value from having these free solutions by being Telecom clients and we are expanding the IT ecosystem in Argentina," he added.

The company has begun offering accounting software Contabilium, business management solution Pertix and quality control-focused Full Audits, among other proprietary and third-party solutions.