R&M on Sunday announced double-digit growth in the Middle East over the past 12 months, stating that it now intends to replicate this success in Turkey, having established a local presence there.
The Swiss cabling specialist nearly doubled its staff strength in the Middle East over the past year, and inaugurated a new regional office Saudi Arabia. R&M also opened a new patch cord assembly facility at its headquarters in Dubai – a first-of-its-kind in the region, the firm said.
“We customised our portfolio to the needs of the region and offered a broad spectrum of products catering to a wide range of vertical markets such as residential, office cabling, industrial, petrochemical, energy, healthcare and defence,” said Jean-Pierre Labry, Executive Vice-President, R&M Middle East, Turkey and Africa.
“The result of these efforts has been exponential growth, even through the tough financial times, and the Middle East, Turkey and Africa region is now one of the fastest growing markets for R&M.”
Following the announcement of its growth figures, R&M outlined a number of regional plans that should help continue this trend throughout 2013.
“This year, we plan to bring a number of innovative products to the market which will be specifically adapted to healthcare, education, transportation, utilities, telecom and city development, as these are the key growth sectors in this region,” said Labry.
The firm said that it intends to capitalise on the increasing deployment of Fibre to the Home (FTTH) connectivity by regional telecos with its new Venus FXXL solution with integrated Single Circuit Management System (SCM) and FO field connectors.
R&M also said that it plans to introduce a new “unified physical network management solution” – or Freenet uniPhy – in the Middle East this year. The system is designed to provide accurate, real-time monitoring of physical layer connectivity.
Copper offerings will also play a large part in regional plans for this year, R&M said. Cat6A remains a highly used cabling solution for the structured cabled industry, the firm reasoned, explaining that it has proved popular in 10GbE infrastructures, as it is “easily” upgradable to 40 to 100GbE.
Labry also reinforced R&M’s commitment to its channel partners, particularly in markets such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Iraq.
“We rely on our channel partners to drive our business, and this year, we have a number of interesting incentives planned to strengthen our partner ties,” he said. “One of these includes replicating the highly successful partner programme that we launched in Egypt last year at either a regional or global level.”
