ATF 2023: Sudhir Juggernath on TelCables' Africa growth strategy

TelCables CEO for Southern and East Africa Sudhir Juggernath joined Connecting Africa Editor Paula Gilbert at Africa Tech Festival 2023 for a video interview to talk about the company's strategy for expansion in Southern and East Africa.

TelCables is a subsidiary of Angola Cables which operates submarine cable networks that connect more than 20 points-of-presence and Internet exchange points (IXPs) in the Americas, Africa, Europe and Asia.

Juggernath only joined the group in September 2023 and spoke about his vision to grow revenue and increase customers in his focus region.

"We will work with partners, we have a niche offering in the sense that we have the shortest path to the US to get good US content and we also see a lot of African consumers looking at South American content – so based on that, from East Africa we would like to offer those customers good content at a very good quality and shorter latency. That will be done though resellers and partners," he said.

He said as TelCables grows its footprint, Mozambique will be the first focus country in 2024, followed by Kenya with expansion into Tanzania and Djibouti in 2025. Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe are also key countries for growth.

He said the arrival of new cable systems like 2Africa and Equiano are good for the continent because more cable systems into Africa provide more opportunity for citizens to connect.

"There is never a cable system that comes in and is going to dominate. Customers want resilience and we see our offering to Equiano as a huge differentiator, because today Equiano on its own has got no resilience, you have to have other cable systems," he explained.

"We have seen what happened in August when all the major cable systems on the west coast went down and we were able to route our customers using WACS and SACS to get content from the US and that proved to keep some of the countries' Internet up, so we are complimentary to Equiano," he added.

He also spoke of regulatory challenges facing cable operators as well as the opportunities for growth in value-added services like cybersecurity and infrastructure-as-a-service.

— Paula Gilbert, Editor, Connecting Africa