Orange Business Services to increase Cairo seats to 1,500 by year-end

The Cairo customer service center has grown from 200 positions in mid-2004 to approximately 1,100 employees in early 2007.

Three years of fruitful collaboration with the Egyptian Government have contributed to the success of the Cairo customer service center. Orange Business Services, the enterprise arm of the France Telecom Group, opened the Cairo customer service center in July 2004. The center provides an extensive range of around-the-clock customer support to approximately 2 000 multinational companies.

Highly motivated and qualified, the Cairo service center's staffs has strong technical skills and provides support in approximately 20 languages, including Arabic, English and French. Fifty percent of local employees have international certification in technical or management areas.

Orange Business Services has cultivated beneficial collaboration with the Egyptian Government, based on training sessions provided by governmental institutes to its local employees. About 4,500 technical training days were totally or partly funded by governmental institutes in 2005 and 2006. In 2007, the Egyptian Government will also fund 6,000 hours of soft skills management training, which will benefit 300 employees as of April.

Cairo is the largest of the three service centers operated by Orange Business Services, the other two being located in Dehli and Rio, and serves about 2,000 multinational customers including a large portion of Fortune 500 companies. The Cairo service center has widely contributed to an improvement in Orange Business Services' customer satisfaction, as noted by third-party customer surveys (e.g.: "Best In Class" rating awarded by Telemark, an independent U.K market intelligence firm).

In Egypt alone, Orange Business Services provides service to 150 local and foreign companies, as well as 50 airlines by offering international data & IP connectivity, network related services and managed & IT services.These customers include Egyptian companies, such as EFG Hermes (the Arab world's premier investment bank), ENPPI (a leading Egyptian engineering company), Egypt Air, as well as foreign companies based in Egypt, such as Akzo Nobel (international company active in the areas of pharmaceuticals, coatings and chemical) and various airlines.