Over the next three years, the UK-based firm BT Global Services, part of BT Group plc, will double its business in Latin American countries. Although the company does not disclose regional numbers, its current Latam revenue is estimated at $500 million. The company believes that the region is dealing well with the global financial crisis and wants to take advantage of this particular moment. “We are confident in the region growing, and looking forward to the Football World Cup 2014 and Olympic Games 2016,” pointed out Jeff Kelly, CEO at BT Global services, during a press conference on Monday Ocotber 3.
BT is basing its expectations on research that has identified an addressable market for the company in the Latin American region of $18.5 billion as of 31 March 2011, growing at a rapid 7% per year. “We want to bring the world to Latin America and Latin America to the world,” said Luis Álvarez, president for the Latin America and EMEA region at BT Global Services. Asked about BT’s growth rate in Latam, Álvarez did not reveal a percentage, but said that it is higher than ICT average growth in the region.
Between 2005 and 2008, BT has made important acquisitions, which have helped the company to grow its revenue. This inorganic growth impacted Latam because some purchased enterprises, such as Comsat, had operations in Latin America. Since 2008, BT has had more organic growth. However, during the press conference, CEO Kelly said that, although the company is concentrating its efforts on organic growth, BT is always looking for some acquisition opportunities. “But ours investments at this moment are focused on hiring people and launching products and service.”
In the Latin American region, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia drive the revenue growth. In most aspects, Brazil leads. For example, the company is recruiting 250 new employees and half of them will be in Brazil. Nowadays, BT counts about 1,000 employees in Latam.
BT is also increasing the number of its MPLS points of presence by around 20% and it is launching Ethernet services in 21 new cities, as well as opening new centers. The company said that will deploy three new centers of excellence to better support its client requirements in the region. The new centers will be in Rio de Janeiro (satellite technologies, products and services), Bogotá (security and data center services) and Mexico City (IP telephony and contact centers).
BT announced that it will also launch about 30 new products or services across the region. BT will increase the reach of the BT Inbound Contact services with new nodes and will be building a new extension of the BT Cloud Contact platform to give customers access to a “pay-as-you-go” cloud contact center in the region. The BT One Video imersive video-conferencing offer will be enhanced with new video bridges. The BT One Cloud hosted unified communications service will be launched together with BT One Voice to deliver a single, consistent service, which can be deployed very quickly to customers’ operations as they expand in the region. The existing portfolio and the new launches will be supported by the BT Assure managed security services.
BT has already done another investment move similar to what it is doing in Latin America. Last fiscal year, the firm conducted an expansion in the Asia region.
BT has four business units, but just the global services exists outside UK. Its represents 40% of all BT’s revenue and most of customers (46%) are from corporate vertical, followed by public sector (24%) and financial institutions (19%). Globally, BT has invested about US $1.54 billion in research and development.
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