VEON ’ s journey to transformation began as a reaction to the increasing entropy it perceived in the telecoms industry , as well as growing headwinds of currency devaluations in the markets it calls home . CEO Jean-Yves Charlier has written that the industry risked becoming dumb pipes facilitating the real engagement being driven by fast-growing OTT players . Meanwhile , VEON – or VimpelCom as it was then known – was performing poorly versus its competitors and was riven with inefficiency . It chose to aggressively and systematically disrupt itself . It ’ s vision : “ a unique telco & tech combination that allows to capture the “ best of both worlds ” The company set about massively improving its capital structure via the consolidation of its two leading markets – it launched the WIND Tre joint venture with Hutchison in Italy and merged Mobilink and Warid in Pakistan . It then refreshed its management team , overhauled its compliance structures , installed new corporate values and hugely reduced its costs .

In 2016 CTO Yogesh Malik and his team initiated group-wide implementation of a new digital IT stack . It is the largest technology transformation the industry has ever seen , completely overhauling how the company is managing its business globally . It is replacing a patchwork legacy infrastructure that has grown country-by-country with one central , cloud-based platform . It is bringing new product development back in-house . The platform provides the analytics power to supercharge product development and helps to realise the company ’ s goal of offering streamlined , personalised services to customers in real-time . A rebrand to VEON and the global roll-out of its eponymous personal-internet platform followed from February 2017 . As the company reported a 9.5 % year-onyear revenue growth for the 9 months 2017 , at $ 7.2bn , the platform surged to a potential userbase of more than 170mn . It is already stacked with almost 140 content partnerships , and will be available in all VEON markets in 2018 . An all-new , global tech company has arrived .