Batelco Corporate Affairs General Manager Ahmed Al Janahi stated that reports in the local media of impending job losses at Batelco, are baseless.
“There are no immediate plans at Batelco to reduce headcount,” he said.
Batelco’s Chief Executive Mr Kaliaropoulos, added, “Telecommunications Regulatory policy decisions, as they relate to Batelco’s competitors obtaining access and interconnecting to Batelco’s network infrastructure, additional local access providers and potentially additional mobile service providers, will result in the need to re-evaluate overall new investments in network infrastructure and ultimately, may result in lower number of employees.”
“There is no target set for any reduction in jobs nor is there any specific plan. We are monitoring industry and regulatory developments and assessing their impact on Batelco,” Mr. Kaliaropoulos added
Mr. Al Janahi continued by stating that it is natural for any competitive business, including Batelco, to review the total headcount as its business evolves.
“Batelco is continually benchmarking its operations with its peers and aims to become one of the best performing telecommunications companies in the Middle East.”
“No programme for headcount reduction exists and should jobs become redundant for various reasons, the few employees who may be affected will receive benefits, according to Batelco's policy dealing with surplus employees.”
“We are working on a number of new initiatives such as creating a strong ICT business and systems integration capability and offering call centre and outsourcing solutions to complement our telecommunications business. Such initiatives will create new, highly skilled roles in Batelco,” Mr. Kaliaropoulos explained.
“The telecommunications industry in the Kingdom is the most liberalised and deregulated across the entire Middle East region. Despite the relatively small size of the market, further deregulation from the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority is resulting in new operators entering the market and the level of competition is radically reshaping the industry,” he said.
“Batelco can not stand still,” he added. “Our priority is to ensure that we deliver better value to our customers in Bahrain and become even more competitive than in the past.”
“We are also focused on promoting Bahrain as the destination of choice for companies wishing to establish their data centre, call centre and ICT operations for their ME region business.”
“The number of employees will predominantly be determined by regulatory changes and by remaining our customers’ best choice for telecommunications services.”
In a very competitive industry, we need to ensure we attract and retain the best talent from Bahrain. As the level of our business is affected by regulatory and competitive pressures, we will always attempt to minimise job losses via re-training and redeployment and we are confident we will remain one of the best employers in the Kingdom,” added Mr Kaliaropoulos.
Batelco is a proud employer of over 1600 men and women in Bahrain of which 96% are Bahraini nationals; this represents one of the highest nationalisation rates in the Kingdom and the region.
“As a pillar of the community, Batelco takes its responsibility to its employees very seriously and invests significantly in staff training and development. During 2006 alone, over BD1.2 million was invested in a wide range of training and development initiatives, with over 79% of employees attending programmes,” noted Mr. Al Janahi.
“We also sponsored our employees to attain higher academic qualifications to further their career development. In 2006 we supported 18 employees for MBA’s, 7 for Bachelors Degrees, 2 Chartered Management Accountants, 13 Higher National Diplomas (HND) and 2 Dilpomas.”
“Batelco remains confident that it will continue to be a market leader in Bahrain with a very significant and sizeable Bahraini workforce and will continue to deliver quality and competitively priced services to its customers,” Mr. Al Janahi added.
It is unfortunate that these baseless rumours of potential job losses persist, even though Batelco has denied such stories.”
“Such inflammatory reports tarnish Batelco’s reputation, which has been gained over 25 years of delivering quality products & services in the Kingdom while also supporting an extensive range of community initiatives through sponsorships and donations.”
“Batelco will investigate whoever is behind spreading baseless rumours and reserves the right to take legal action,” Mr. Al Janahi concluded.
