Shining a light

Think your customers are difficult? Karim Khoja must cope with the Taliban
“THEY may be Taliban, they may be warlords, who cares?” asks Karim Khoja, rhetorically. “We are apolitical—they are customers.” Nobody could accuse Mr Khoja of being narrow-minded. Indeed, his easy-going approach has allowed him to build a successful mobile-phone business in one of the world's least hospitable markets, war-torn Afghanistan. One legacy of more than two decades of occupation, fighting and terror—and little in the way of economic activity before that—was that Afghanistan did not have much of a traditional fixed-line telecoms infrastructure. This presented a chance to leapfrog the old technology and go straight to mobile phones. A mobile-phone network requires a lot of radio masts, however. Whether they remain standing, especially in remote parts of Afghanistan, depends on the goodwill of the locals. Hence Mr Khoja's customer-centric philosophy. “When we go to a village, we talk to the elders and explain how when a mast comes to an area it brings jobs and economic growth,” he says. He adds, not entirely reassuringly, that everybody in Afghanistan, including the Taliban, understands the importance of being able to communicate.    .Continue........