Marseille, Ingenio's stronghold serving Africa and Europe

The telecom integrator creates a holding company, a central purchasing office and aims to develop a talent management offer

Rabih Farah, a Congo-based entrepreneur with Lebanese roots, plans to grow his telecommunications company in the Aix-Marseille-Provence Metropolis. Ingenio will be a decision center that houses the central functions of its three African entities, a purchasing center and a talent management platform for its long-standing partners and customers, which include major operators like MTN and Orange and manufacturers such as ZTE, Nokia and Ericsson. The project was sourced by Business France and is getting support from Provence Promotion for a whole range of procedures related to real estate, finance, mobility, etc.

For Rabih Farah, who founded the telecommunications and network integrator Digilogie in Congo in 2012, Marseille will be his stronghold covering Africa, Europe and the rest of the world. By setting up the parent company, Ingenio, in France, the telecommunications expert who previously worked at ITG, Cisco and Ericsson, is consolidating his subsidiaries and developing new projects.

" Marseille offers the best opportunity to consolidate and organize all my activities by establishing a single decision-making center. I filed the articles of association for Ingenio in January 2021 and now I'm finalizing my talent passport with the assistance of Provence Promotion,"  explains Rabih Farah, who has been advised by François Coulomb and Maribel Sierra, who handle expansion and relocation projects at Provence Promotion.

Now that the initial steps of forming Ingenio are behind him, Rabih Farah will focus on hiring, starting with a site manager and a technical sales representative. In the medium term, he will recruit 10 more people to flesh out the management and technical teams.

Marseille, a strategic location

" In France, I had the choice between Saint-Nazaire, Le Havre and Marseille. Marseille is perfect because it is Mediterranean-oriented and is easily accessible for business in Africa and the Middle East, where I'd like to expand in the future. Here I have all the infrastructure I need to transport our equipment, including optical fiber, cables and batteries,"  explains Rabih Farah, CEO of the three Digilogie subsidiaries (€22 million annual sales in 2021) and now President of Ingenio.

"Today, we are the leading integrator in Congo with two main offices in Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire. The company has been growing rapidly since 2019 and we recently renewed our maintenance contracts with MTN Congo, the second-largest operator in Africa, for three more years," notes Rabin Farah, who employs 86 people in Congo, and more than 50 in the DRC, Cameroon and Côte d'Ivoire. His teams recently designed and deployed a solar solution for MTN Congo to power 125 kiosks located in rural areas. The project involved renewable energies and represents a new avenue for growth.

A central purchasing office and a talent management solution

True to its Latin etymology, Ingenio intends to put its talent and inventiveness to work to find creative and innovative solutions for its clients.

Drawing on its strategic geographic position, Ingenio in Marseille will be in charge of purchasing for all its subsidiaries. The resulting supply chain optimization service will then be offered to its customers.

But Ingenio's most significant investments will go toward designing an innovative talent management platform for internal knowledge sharing, skills transfer and employee development curve management. The SaaS software solution will make it possible to identify and mobilize internal skills to match needs instead of using external consultants. This is an especially valuable capability for large groups and multinationals with numerous locations and thousands of engineers scattered around the world.

With an integrated training management module, this high value-added offer will appeal to Digilogie's network of partners in Africa and Europe before it is used to win over additional customers.