Forecasting operator movements, and defending the call, across volatile APAC and MEA markets
An embedded research engagement supporting a global telecom intelligence provider, covering mobile operators across South-East Asia, India, and the Middle East and Africa.
Client details anonymized; figures illustrative where confidential.
Operator strategy teams, vendors, and investors needed more than a number; they needed to know why a market was moving and whether the forecast would hold through disruption. The hard part was turning noisy, fast-changing signals into a view people could bet on.
The work blended a planned research agenda with consulting. Each year we set the themes that mattered to large operators, such as digital transformation, regulation, country and regional market movements, and network-sharing agreements; against that, I owned the regional forecasts and was the primary contact for the reasoning behind them, turning around event-driven assessments like COVID impact in a day or two and flagging forward risks before clients had to ask.
I became the client's first call on operator movements and forecast rationale, and in time took on the team's escalations, quality reviews, and bi-monthly readouts to senior leadership. Progressed from associate to senior analyst over the engagement.