In his speech at the meeting, Turkish Telecom CEO Mehmet Ekinalan, said that the foundation had achieved great innovations throughout 10 years and that it had important contributions to the development of Turkish economy. Ekinalan pointed out that the subscribers had increased 45 percent considering 10 years before, and reached nearly 20 million, and on the other hand, serving personnel had decreased from 74 thousand to 55 thousand. Ekinalan expressed that the ability of the foundation to serve to a greater number of subscribers with a wider range of services with fewer personnel is an important indicator of efficiency. He also underlined that Turkish Telecom managed to reflect the world wide developments in communications sector via the infrastructure investments that were realized. Ekinalan informed that in the period between 1995 and 2005 total fiber optic cable length that had been installed had increased from 28 thousand kms to 91 thousand kms, and that the number of cable TV subscribers exceeded 1 million and that the digitalization ratio at the digital terminals exceeded 97 percent.
Turkish Telecom CEO Mehmet Ekinalan said that they had declared the year 2004 as the “Data Year”, and that this was an indicator of a main change in their corporate strategy. Ekinalan underlined that Turkish Telecom is going to focus on data communication and beyond this, on value added services by keeping up their present power in the voice market. Mehmet Ekinalan said that the big increase in the number of ADSL subscribers last year is going to continue and that besides ADSL, with other broadband investments they are going to serve Turkey as a whole with high capacity internet access. He also added that they were going to cooperate with their solution partners on the fields of value added services.
