Sri Lanka Telecom PLC. is one of the most valuable blue chip companies in Sri Lanka with a market capitalization of SL Rs. 53.24 billion (September 2019). Sri Lanka Telecom is the leading Digital Service Provider and the leading broadband and backbone infrastructure services provider in Sri Lanka. The two main shareholders of Sri Lanka Telecom as at year end were the Government of Sri Lanka ( 49.5% stake) through the Secretary to the Treasury and Global Telecommunication Holdings (GTH) N.V. (44.98% stake). The balance shares are publicly traded on the CSE. The Company has been awarded a National Long Term Rating of AAA (lka) and a B+ rating on Long Term Corporate Credit Rating by Standard & Poor’s.
The SLT Group has a customer base of over eight million including multinational corporations, large and small corporate, public sector, retail and domestic customers. The SLT Group provides a full range of ICT facilities and services in the areas of voice, data, broadband, wholesale, enterprise, TV and mobile services.
BMD spoke with Mr. Kumarasinghe Sirisena recently on Sri Lanka Telecom’s leadership and its way forward in a highly competitive industry.
Excerpts from the interview:
Kumarasinghe Sirisena
Mr Kumarasinghe Sirisena was appointed as Chairman/Director, Sri Lanka Telecom in January 2015.
He also serves as Director/Chairman of Mobitel (Private) Limited, eChannelling PLC, SLT Digital Info Services (Private) Limited, SLT Visioncom (Private) Limited, SLT Human Capital Solutions (Private) Limited, Sky Network (Private) Limited, SLT Property Management (Private) Limited, Sri Lanka Telecom (Services) Limited, SLT Campus (Private) Limited, and Director of Galle Submarine Cable Depot (Private) Limited. He is a member of the Remuneration and Nomination Committee.
Mr Sirisena has also served as the Managing Director of State Development and Construction Corporation and CEO/General Manager of State Timber Corporation.
He currently serves as a Director of the Land Reclamation and Development Company Limited (REDECO) and LRDC Services (Private) Limited. He counts over 32 years of work experience including general management, financial management, and human resource management in the private and government sectors.
Mr Sirisena holds a BSc Honors (Special) Degree in Management, Master of Business Administration (MBA), Master of Human Resource Management, Diploma in Business Management, a Postgraduate Diploma in Accountancy, Financial Management, and Project Management from the University of Sri Jayewardenepura and other institutions. In addition, he is also a Fellow member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Institute of Certified Professional Managers, Institute of Government Accounts and Finance, Association of Accounting Technicians of Sri Lanka and the Association of Public Finance Accountants of Sri Lanka – the public sector wing of Chartered Accountants of Sri Lanka. He is a certified member of the Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing, member of the Sri Lanka Institute of Directors, member of the Institute of Personnel Management of Sri Lanka and an Associate member of the Association of FIR Professionals of Sri Lanka.
Q: There are many competitors in your field. How has your company kept ahead or abreast of competition?
SLT is the incumbent telecommunication services provider with a track record of serving national and international telecommunication services for more than 160 years in the country. With the industry liberalization program of the country, SLT was converted from department of telecommunication to a fully owned government corporation in 1991 with the enactment of Telecommunication Act in Sri Lanka. It passes through transformation to face the challenges in the liberalized and competitive market place in several stages; divested 35% of its shares to a strategic partner NTTCom in Japan in 1997 and subsequently became a private listed company in the CSE in 2003. Today Company’s shareholding consists 49.5% to GOSL and Government Institutes, 45% to Global Telecommunications Holdings Inc. and balance as public shares. The company has strategically transformed its structure to face increased competition with multiple licenses being issued by the regulator. Further, SLT is the only service provider in Sri Lanka which will have 60% government ownership when the additional 5% of shares are listed in the stock market to comply the 10% public share according to the SEC’s rule.
Today, there are four mobile operators and three fixed line operators in the industry with multiple services provides for data, internet and TV services. We are the leading telco service provider despite heavy competition. We welcome competition since we believe that it is good for the consumer. As a result of competition Sri Lankan consumers enjoy one of the lowest telecom charges in the world.
SLT owns high brand image for offering high quality broadband and IPTV services as well as being a leading service provider for high end enterprise and government solutions. SLT is the National Backbone Provider of the country and has the strategic network asset of five submarine cables connecting Sri Lanka globally with its modern state of art technologies.
By mid 2019, SLT Group had gained 1.8 Million fixed line connections to households and businesses, 415,000 PEO TV (IPTV) connections, 966, 925 broadband connections, and around 8000,000 new mobile subscribers through its fully owned subsidiary, Mobitel which has coverage of 85% of country’s population of its 3G and 4G services. The group also had a dominant position with 33% growth in the non-voice and enterprise segments in 2018.
We are keeping up with the market trends by introducing fiber cables with next Generation Access networks ‘Fiber Anywhere’ using xGPON technologies integrating well with Sri Lanka’s ultra high speed domestic and global networks, wireless 3G and 4G networks, Tier IV ready state of art Data Centre technologies, Akaza Cloud platform, satellite technology and Digital Services Provision with widespread digital product stack offerings. SLT’s aim is to be the undisputed leader in Sri Lanka Digital Service Provision.
The “Fiber to Anywhere” project targets two million FTTH fiber ports across the country of which 1 million ports will be delivered by 2020. The national optical fiber backbone network covers all provinces and districts including all 329 Divisional Secretariats of the country to provide high speed fiber connectivity solutions to all the operators and business and customers. Further, SLT provides the largest VPN network connecting 3,500 state institutions across the country at a cost of Rs 3.2 billion. The aim of this project is achieving a Smart Government which will be facilitated by the company’s capital investments to roll out technologies Rs 150 billion in recent years.
When it comes to integrating with Sri Lanka’s global network, now we have initiated the work on for new international submarine cable SEA-ME-WE 6 in 2020. This in additional to international submarine cables of SEA-ME-WE 3, SEA-ME-WE 4 and SEA-ME-WE 5. Also cables to Maldives (Dhiragu) and India (BSNL) are planned expansions. Along with our global strategy, SLT launched global brand Xyntex , the business unit for Sri Lanka’s global network integration.An investment of around Rs 3 billion was made to build important digital infrastructure Tier 4 ready National Data Centre. We are continuing on 4G network Expansion and target 92% of population to be covered by end of this year. SLT’s Satellite Technologies are useful in disaster management, security and crime prevention.
It is said that if you increase the digitalization of a country by 10%, you increase the GDP by 2.5%. As we transform to a digital service provider (DSP), we aim at becoming the leader in it with more than 75% market share by 2020. The 18 verticals identified in the National Digital Roadmap and Smart Sri Lanka launched recently is the modality to transform the nation for increased digital inclusion of the citizens in Sri Lanka.
National Digital Roadmap and Smart Sri Lanka will run on the country wide fiber backbone and state of art digital infrastructure. Our revenue model from this is to provide digital enabling services to the government institutions and enterprises for widespread digital services in relation to verticals smart home, smart city, smart education, smart security, smart health, smart agriculture, smart transport, smart tourism etc.
SLT has very committed and talented Human Capital and established business units across the country. Also, SLT has continually transformed its business models, along with the new technological trends to meet customer’s needs and expectations all the time, thus achieving its market leadership position in the competition.
Q: Are you enjoying a reasonable market share?
We are the leading service provider in a number of businesses – despite heavy competition. However, we welcome competition since we believe that it is good for the consumers and enhance the industry. SLT is confident of its business success with network resources and capabilities to deliver the services to fulfill high quality services.
Q: We all know that there are threats to any business venture. Have you turned any such threat into an opportunity?
A key threat is that SLT is the only state majority owned telco where it is bound to comply certain processes and stringent government regulations in some situations while all other operators are foreign owned telcos and free from obstacles for taking decisions fast.
SLT has to operate in urban as well as rural communication services leading to higher overheads-specially rural broadband and the national backbone network which SLT only attends to, is costlier. But this threat is being converted to an opportunity by commercially leasing these infrastructure to private sector operators.
Also we are providing a combined solution in which fixed lines and mobiles are mixed into a single service. At the same time, SLT takes this as an opportunity to make a competitive edge in the market enhancing the reliability and consistency of our services in any part of the country. The SEA-ME-WE 5 has the full landing station in Matara and will serve international data connectivity with lowest latency as competitive advantage while it entrusted with multiple cables providing greater redundancy of our services.
We aim to provide more value added services through the fiber network. Boosting our bandwidth is vital to face competition which is a complement from our largest fiber network and our Mobile Broadband network expansion project -Stage 8 investments that have been made to face the competition specially for the mobile market.
Q: What drives you for results?
Being in service profession for 34 years, I am always driven for results. These years also have given me the leadership experience. When I took over SLT, I had MBA but did not know anything on the engineering side. Now I am familiar with engineering concepts in networking and telecom. Collaborative approach to my work also gets me results. Hands on operational involvement rather than theoretical approach, maximum commitment, integrating policy and operations at all possible times, always supporting higher investments in Human Resource Development and rewarding well performing employees are some other drivers of results.
Q: How do you stay motivated despite obstacles and setbacks?
A vast knowledge and in-depth experience is the primary motivational factor.
As this is a state sector based DSP, human resource “transformation”, rather than mere “development” is a major challenge. Since we are the sole state owned DSP, it is inevitable that many employees have the “Customer should come to us” mindset which is unfavorable. I am trying to change this to a customer centric “Customer is our family member” attitude, making it the unofficial slogan across all of SLT and Mobitel. Now we managed to gradually bring in the performance culture within SLT. We started to align organizational culture and human resource transformation within SLT. A major technical challenge is the fixed lines challenge where heavy technology investment had to be made to meet the challenge. The main challenge however is to convert the 21.5 million Sri Lankan population to become SLT customers.
Q:What is the contribution of your staff to achieve company goals?
It is the staff who help create value and sustain SLT. In fact, the employees played an important role in SLT becoming a transformed institution from a government run monopoly to a competitive market oriented Company. When we first introduced modern human resource management tools such as Smart Attendance, there was resistance but now our employees realize the value of such practices. To maintain camaraderie among employees, we introduced “HeartBook” similar to Facebook –this is only for SLT employees and a success. For SLT professionals, who go on Linkedin, we introduced “Mindbook”. Some of the outstation sales work has now been converted to group camping and adventure tours resulting in more employees joining the outstation sales work.
Q: Many organizations say that the biggest problem they are confronting today is retention of human resources. How about your position?
As I mentioned above, introducing employee friendly initiatives, such as introducing “HeartBook” and “Mindbook”, group camping and adventure tours for outstation sales work, have helped us to retain employees. Also being a government supported institution, no more political appointments to SLT, competitive compensation and “Family Culture” are other factors that help us to maintain a good HR base.
Q: Are you happy with the performance of your workforce?
It is thanks to our workforce that we have been able to face severe competition and rise up with various new initiatives.
Q: What is the best advice you can offer to young executives?
I would like to give three advices:
“Don’t complain about the competition-instead, be competitive”.
“Build trust with your co-workers. Think of them as your team or even as your family.”
“In this industry, do not look for Work-Life Balance; instead, try to enjoy your work and make it your life”. bmd
BMD November 2019…