Saudi Arabia, China to boost accounting, auditing collaboration  

Jeddah - Yasmine El Tohamy - RIYADH: Digital users from the Indian Ocean to Europe can soon expect enhanced reliability, resilience, and data protection, thanks to a new corridor established by Zain Omantel International.    

The company has collaborated with Telecom Egypt to establish the new route design, which will connect the Mediterranean Sea with the Arabian Sea and Arabian Gulf, according to a statement.  

This move offers an opportunity for subsea cable owners by helping them reduce their construction costs as well as elevate latency, resilience, and market response times.   

“We are excited to collaborate with ZOI on this strategic project; it’s a game-changer in the Eurasia route connectivity landscape,” Managing Director and CEO at Telecom Egypt Mohamed Nasr said.   

“As we look for innovative ways to better serve our customers, we will consistently strive to provide a seamless international connectivity network and increase our diversity layers without compromising quality, cost, or speed,” he added. 

Nasr highlighted the firm’s strategy to leverage Telecom Egypt’s established history in subsea cables and its experienced team to achieve this goal, while the CEO of ZOI Sohail Qadir said: “We are delighted to partner with Telecom Egypt on such a groundbreaking project.” 

He added: “ZOI was created to revolutionize the wholesale telecom scene, and this is an example of what the future holds.” 

Qadir emphasized that the firm is actively working to facilitate the landing of subsea connections through its shareholders, such as Omantel and Zain KSA, who are the licensees in those jurisdictions. 

“This one-of-a-kind infrastructure will be expanded to most of ZOI’s network footprint to maximize the benefit to our group operations across the region,” Qadir added. 

He stressed that the digital corridor would create enormous value, widely realized in the region and beyond, not only from a connectivity perspective but also on technological, commercial, and social levels. 

Additionally, the infrastructure is projected to extend from Oman’s Arabian Sea and Gulf shores to Egypt’s Mediterranean coastline. This will involve a high fiber count as well as an innovative blend of terrestrial and subsea segments. 

The terrestrial segments are planned to span Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, while the subsea section is expected to directly link the Kingdom and Egypt through the Red Sea. This will feature a high-capacity, repeaterless cable system. 

Saudi Arabia has witnessed a surge in digital transformation, with over 6,000 government services digitized, constituting 97 percent of total government services.  

As per the National Transformation Program’s 2022 report, the Kingdom achieved regional first and global third positions in the World Bank’s GovTech Maturity Index 2022.