As Türk Telekom group, we’re determined to continue on realizing our plans for investments, research-development and employment. During this period of global economic stagnation, our aim is to develop our infrastructure projects and services, present projects towards encouraging innovation and enrich our range of value added products and services. In that regard we are sometimes benefiting from price drops, such as copper prices, due to reduced demand, and accordingly we are speeding up our access network upgrade accordingly, including now the introduction of fibre in the loop.
We believe that the development in product and service quality will contribute to economic revival in telecommunication sector as in all areas and help to end this period of stagnation. Thus we’re working as a big team together with all our departments including technology (Network/IT), strategy, regulatory, law, sales, marketing, customer relations and human resources.
The most important development for our company in 2008 was the initial public offering of our shares in May 2008. Türk Telekom’s public offering was the 7th largest public offering globally in 2008.
Listing TT was indeed a milestone for the company. Being a public company is an important step, and we have been successful, despite a turbulent environment. The discipline of ‘public’ quarterly reporting and aligning the full management around meeting or exceeding guidance and targets, makes us all more conducive to succeed, and we like the pressure. In addition, the introduction of management incentives and performance-related pay certainly improved the management spirit and working culture, from effort and sacrifice, to performance and reward.
We announced 2008 as the year of products and technology. Considering the products that we’ve placed in the market, it’s obvious that 2008 was in fact a product year for Türk Telekom. During this period, we focused on presenting innovative and value added products to our customers.
We presented our Videofon service to our customers with this aim. Videofon which enables visual conversation via fixed lines like home and office lines is a very important product of Turkish innovation. The software developed by one of our group companies, namely Argela, constitutes an essential component of this product.
As Türk Telekom group, we’re developing in all business lines including mobile, fixed and broadband with the help of convergence technologies in providing value added products and services. Argela started developing the necessary technologies for “convergence”. First products of our R&D works are Wi-phone, WiRO and 3G supported devices. With WiRO you can take your home line with you wherever you travel. WiRO enables customers use Wi-Fi supporting mobile phones or desktop/laptop computers to make calls from everywhere abroad over the internet to be charged under home or office line subscriptions. In the near future we’ll continue adding value to our customers’ lives and make their lives easier everywhere and every time by providing convergence products like WiRO.
Our customers showed great interest in our new user friendly tariffs which have been designed according to the usage habits of the customers. We promoted these tariffs by 3 million outbound calls and helped our customers to choose the best tariff according to their needs. New voice offers with bundles which will also cover national and international calls will be offered in 2009; and we will be calling around 10 million customers until June to help them choose the best tariff for themselves.
In order to increase customer loyalty and the voice traffic we distributed around 400K DECT phones through our campaigns in 2008. We aim to increase DECT phone penetration more with additional more than 650K DECT phones in 2009.
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