A fresh approach.
A few years ago, mobile phones were suddenly for everyone – no longer the preserve of business people and the wealthy.
In telco boardrooms across the region, slides showed prepaid customers eating into an ever-larger slice of market-share pie. Operators were keen to attract this lucrative, but price-sensitive, segment.
In 2004, Arkadi Panitch was at one of the Belgian mobile network operators, whose management wanted a new ‘low end’ strategy. Should the company extend its existing brand? Or launch a new low-cost brand?
‘Neither, we thought,’ says Arkadi. Instead, he reasoned, why not partner with a brand that already has strong associations for the target market?
‘We suggested the retail giant Carrefour, whose “No.1” brand was widely recognised as “the best for price”. We could use their own distribution channels, the supermarkets themselves, as the point of sale.
‘Carrefour would be an MVNO [mobile virtual network operator] piggybacking on the MNO network. It would be a happy outcome for everyone.’
But it was a no go...
Around this time, Michail Susov was getting ready to leave Russia’s largest mobile operator MTS, after successfully launching its own low-cost brand, ‘Jeans’.
Over a series of dinners in restaurants across Europe, Arkadi and Michail discussed the possibility of taking the idea to Carrefour themselves.
Michail continues, ‘Personally, I had gone about as far as I could [working] within an operator. I was ready for a new challenge and suggested we start a company together, each of us bringing a handful of trusted colleagues on board.’
Effortel was born. Based in Brussels, our business enables leading brands to offer simple, useful and inexpensive telecom products to their customers.
The company’s first major client was Carrefour with its 1 Mobile launched in Belgium in February 2006, followed by Uno Mobile launched in Italy in June 2007. You can find out more about them in our case studies.