Enrique Yamuni Robles

What is your perception of the current state of the telecommunications industry in Mexico?

The telecoms sector in Mexico continues to growth after 20 years or more of outperforming the Mexican economy, our industry was one of the few that grew as a result of COVID-19 with fixed services growing at a healthy pace. On the corporate side, sectors that we serve were hit hard. In fact, more than 1 million small businesses in Mexico closed as a result. In our case, we are focused on micro and middle-sized businesses, though we do serve the government and some big corporations. This sector has been recovering, and we are growing more than 2020. In a general perspective, we do not see tourism returning to pre-pandemic levels. Nevertheless, we do expect an uptrend in the amusement and entertainment industries, and business to return to healthy levels, with a full recovery toward the end of the year and going into 2022.

What services do you cover the most, and what is most in demand for Megacable?

On the mass market, our most demanded service is broadband. This service has regained relevance in the last periods given the necessity of the people to remain connected, for home office, distance learning or entertainment purposes. However, we continue to push triple play bundles as our main product, including video and telephony. On the corporate side, we now offer solutions to improve the connectivity capacities of SMEs, helping them to implement hybrid schemes, that allows them operate on premises and through home office. The previously mentioned is complemented with solutions of broadband security and cloud services.

Have you, therefore, expanded your profile to focus on the private sector?

We have a business called Ho1a that sells a great deal of equipment and smart networks for applications and administrative services. Things have changed, and now businesses are moving towards the cloud. We are adjusting our focus on that point. People are going online, due to the global situation, so crime has increased in terms of ransomware. There are people dedicated to steal personal data, commit fraud, and so on. We are more committed to the security of the network and the data on the cloud, with software and hardware as a service.

What are the main priorities for the short term?

Penetration is racing thanks to the pandemic. Internet connection wasn’t necessarily there before, but now it has gained relevance as basic service, generally in third place, behind electricity and water, and it will likely remain that way. People have realized they need broadband all the time for education, home office, news, and entertainment. The penetration of broadband has increased, especially in cities, and we are able to see a connection, the bigger the city, the larger the penetration. We are in a solid position. Fortunately, when we realized the pandemic was imminent, and made arrangements with our technology vendors for more capacity. Normally, we had hardware in place, but now everything is with software, so we needed licenses and activations. We called our providers and asked for the full capacity to use for three months. However, three months became four, and on the fifth month, we discussed what to do. We decided we could not see the end of the tunnel, so we negotiated a price and paid for the extra capacity. Still, this allowed us to provide excellent service, and our network was never saturated. We were able to increase speeds for customers rapidly, and they did not experience any problems with bandwidth for their home offices. This was in February 2020, and when the pandemic hit us even harder, distance education and home offices became the standard, and no one had any problems. We were prepared and did a great job there. When that happened, our competition was still planning what to do.