It’s been exactly a year since Tri Pham was appointed as Chief Strategy Officer of Tata Communications. He is responsible for managing the company’s growth plans, entry into new markets and mergers and acquisitions. Under his stewardship, the company had exited from South African operator Neotel in May, a move hailed by the analyst community. Pham’s endeavour is to build a culture of innovation, strengthen the partner ecosystem and bring a solutions-led approach to client engagements.

The results are now showing. Enterprise data is leading the turnaround of Tata Communications’ core business, as exemplified by a 15 per cent rise in its net profit to ₹92.39 crore for the quarter ended September 30, 2014. . In what was his first media interaction, Pham told BusinessLine that the company is growing faster than most of its peers. Edited Excerpts:

Since coming on board, what changes are you trying to usher in at Tata Communications?

Our strategy is to leverage what we have done in the past and move towards a much more solutions-oriented dialogue with our clients. Instead of waiting for a request for proposal (RFP) from the client, we ought to be more proactive with CIOs. So, many of our upcoming services will be solutions-led. That requires us to be more resourceful, especially for extending the reach of our infrastructure and joint-selling of services with partners. Lastly, we wish to be an innovative company and keep pace with the changes in technology. The question is whether we can react fast to the latest trends and benefit from them. For that to happen, the organisation has to evolve culturally. It is work in progress currently. The changes will be reflected in some of the new client wins that we will announce later this year.

Over the years, Tata Communications has invested heavily in its undersea cables. As voice business becomes increasingly commoditised, would you refrain from committing fresh capital for undersea cables?

The undersea cable network can be applied across voice, data and other services. We already have the largest wholly-owned undersea cable network that connects 25 per cent of the world’s Internet traffic. Will we build new cables? I think it will be on a select basis, given our commitment to improve margins and profitability. As undersea cable projects tend to be capital intensive, we have to be prudent in terms of how we deploy capital.

Recently, Tata Communications sold its stake in Neotel, South Africa’s second biggest fixed-line phone operator, to Vodacom SA. Is Tata Communications looking to monetise more assets?

Let me not give you the impression that we are looking to rationalise our portfolio. We like what we own currently; I do not think that the intent is to sell anything. With Neotel, we felt it would take us significant amount of investment to scale the business to the next level. Instead, we thought of deploying capital for other purposes.

We are currently in a period wherein the likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are driving the entire mobile telephony ecosystem? Doesn’t that put pressure on companies like Tata Communications to re-invent and look at business-to-consumer opportunities?

Today, we may be competing with our peers, but given the disruption that is happening in the communications space, I won’t be surprised if our biggest threats going forward turn out to be the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook. We think it is prudent to actually collaborate with some of these players instead of competing. Therefore, our strategy is to be a B2B2C (business-to-business-to-consumer) company. We think we can enable the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook as they extend their play into the enterprise space. Historically, these companies have targeted retail consumers or small and medium businesses, but that’s going to change. The enterprise space, something which we are comfortable with, requires stricter service level agreements, quality offerings and security. We can definitely help these online players become more enterprise-ready.

Analysts believe that Tata Group Chairman Cyrus Mistry is not as bullish on the telecom space as compared to his predecessor. Does that change your role as Chief Strategy Officer?

Recently, we compared ourselves with our larger peers and realised that we growing faster than most big telcos. Correspondingly, our margins and profitability have been improving.

If we can re-position ourselves with some of our peers in terms of valuation, there is a lot of upside for the business. So, we see no reason why the promoters would want to exit such an opportunity. We are at a stage where we are demonstrating scale and the financial impact of this will become more visible over the next few years.

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