Telecom & Media
How leading telecom players in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are building digital product ecosystems beyond connectivity.
The super app concept — a single digital entry point for communication, commerce, payments, entertainment, and services — has transformed consumer markets in China, Southeast Asia, and more recently India. In MENA, the conditions for super app emergence are maturing: high smartphone penetration, growing digital payment adoption, and telecom operators sitting on massive customer bases with existing trust and billing relationships. The question is whether MENA telecoms will build this future or watch it be built by someone else.
Telecom operators have three assets that no pure digital platform possesses in isolation: universal reach (every SIM-card holder is a potential user), billing infrastructure (the ability to charge for digital services through existing airtime and postpaid accounts), and physical distribution (retail stores in every city and town that can onboard digital services in person). WeChat succeeded in part because Tencent could leverage existing user relationships. Alipay succeeded because Alibaba had commerce relationships. MENA telecoms have something comparable — the question is whether they have the product capability and organizational will to exploit it.
The MENA super app opportunity is distinct from its Asian analogues. The core use cases that aggregate daily behavior in the region are: messaging (already saturated by WhatsApp), payments (increasingly covered by Vodafone Cash, OrangePayment, and their equivalents), food and grocery delivery (Talabat, Instashop, and others), ride hailing, and entertainment. A telecom super app that meaningfully integrates several of these — with the advantage of no-friction identity verification through the SIM and billing through existing telco accounts — can build a stickiness that purpose-built apps struggle to match.
RTG's work with Vodafone Foundation on Ta3limy demonstrates how telecoms can deploy connectivity as a platform for social services — extending the concept of the operator's value beyond the pipe and into the experience layer. This social value proposition — connectivity enabling education, health, or economic opportunity — is a differentiation that pure digital platforms cannot replicate and that builds a deeper kind of loyalty than any promotion can.
Building a super app is not a technology project — it is a business model transformation. It requires telecoms to think like product companies: obsessing over user experience, measuring engagement and retention as aggressively as ARPU, and moving on product timelines measured in weeks rather than procurement cycles measured in years. The telecoms that will win are those willing to build product teams with genuine autonomy, partner with agile technology partners, and accept that digital product development has a different failure tolerance than network infrastructure.
What it takes for a telecom company to genuinely transform into a technology-first organization.
MENA’s media and streaming landscape is booming. The region’s OTT market grew 35% year-over-year in 2025, driven by local original content, sports rights, and improving broadband penetration. Shahid,
For decades, the MENA telecommunications sector defined itself by a single metric: network coverage and call quality. The business model was straightforward—own the pipes, sell minutes and data. By...
