BT to invest in Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa

NEW DELHI, INDIA: BT announced a new phase of investments into the rapidly growing economies of Asia Pacific, Turkey, the Middle East and Africa (AMEA) with the objective of accelerating its expansion in high growth markets.

BT will be capturing opportunities in a total AMEA market evaluated at around 32 billion GBP. This new phase of investments builds on the success of earlier programmes announced in 2010 for the Asia Pacific region and in 2012 for Turkey, the Middle East and Africa.

The combined geography is expected to generate 44% of the global GDP growth by 2025, with 3 billion people expected to enter the middle class over the next decade.

Developments announced will include the following:

- 400+ new people focused on regional business growth across all key markets, including Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Turkey.

- New hires will include industry specialists focused on sectors such as logistics, healthcare, consumer packaged goods and financial services, and professional services experts based in 11 countries.

- These hires will be additional to the 600 positions announced earlier this year for BT's Global Development Centre in Bangalore and to the c.600 hires expected for BT's new Global Shared Service facility in Kuala Lumpur announced in April.

- Securing new value added services licenses in various countries, enabling an extended portfolio offering.

- Better infrastructure through five new IP and Ethernet Points of Presence starting with India and Turkey, four Network-to-Network Interfaces (NNIs) with the first in Indonesia, and an enhanced satellite capability to support remote coverage and disaster recovery.

- Stronger portfolio capabilities in the fields of security, cloud, unified communications, mobility and contact centres.

- New sector solutions in domains such as health analytics, a suite of Point of Sale solutions for the retail sector and high performance supply chain management services

- A new strategic service assurance centre in Malaysia, providing 24x7 incident management capabilities for complex contracts.