Subaskaran Allirajah, Executive Chairman, Lycamobile receives Golden Peacock Entrepreneurship Award 2013



Mr. Allirajah, Chairman has inspired his team to activate Lycamobile’s biggest market launch to date; introducing the service to the USA with the offer to bring an unparalleled level of cost and quality of service to American consumers. Set to double the business revenue next year, Lycamobile (USA) launched in 2013 in the US’s first full MVNO, operational in 17 states with plans to expand it to 25 states shortly. Recently, he was invited to Boston, Massachusetts to deliver a Keynote Speech at a Conference for senior industry executives in Telecommunications. This trip proved the catalyst in establishing a dialogue with the mobile network operators in the USA, and the introduction of the Lycamobile proposition in the US market.

Over the following two years, Mr. Allirajah and his team have done a deal with T-Mobile USA. He has established a novel auditing procedure to study American consumers, in serving an international call network. He has analyzed a total of 66 million immigrants and expatriates in the US market who were still being served primarily by the prepaid phone card market, as a solution to connect to their friends and families back home.

In 2012, Mr. Allirajah commissioned two state-of-the-art data centres in New York; as well as a call centre base in Mexico and over 30 offices across the country. It was a total investment of £10 million. He is planning to hire an extra 2000 staff to be employed to add to Lycamobile’s current core team of 500. His market is the Hispanic community who collectively hold $1.2 trillion purchasing power in the US. He has targeted them with a £35 million marketing and media plan running across TV, press, radio, outdoor, events and online.

Mr. Allirajah’s U.S. success story, in equally inspiring, in the European market which have been well documented; the addition of Germany to his portfolio in 2012 ensured Lycamobile has greater coverage of the European population than any other mobile operator. A subsequent move into Ireland and Portugal served to embed Lycamobile’s footprint across Europe. Lycamobile now cover over 80 per cent of the EU population, giving customers access to a network which provides high-quality and affordable international calls.

His 5,000 strong global team recently celebrated reaching a target of €1 billion turnover for 2013. He plans to double this figure by 2014. Lycamobile is now the largest low-cost international call provider in the world, on a current run rate of €1.2 - €1.3 billion.