Monday, January 02, 2006
IQBAL Z. QUADIR
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He is currently a fellow at Harvard’s Center for Business and Government. Quadir spent most of the 1990s founding and building GrameenPhone Ltd., which has now become Bangladesh’s largest telephone company, with revenues of $150 million in 2002. His childhood exposure to the conditions in rural Bangladesh combined with his later venture capital experience in New York led Quadir to recognize that the ensuing digital revolution could facilitate the introduction of telephony to 100 million people living in rural Bangladesh. In 1994, he formally launched this effort by convincing angel investors to establish a New York based company, Gonofone (meaning “People’s Phone”) to help him organize what subsequently became known as GrameenPhone.
Quadir’s vision of a large-scale commercial project that could serve all urban areas and 68,000 villages in Bangladesh led him to organize a global consortium involving Telenor AS, the primary telephone company in Norway; an affiliate of micro-credit pioneer Grameen Bank in Bangladesh; Marubeni Corp. in Japan; Asian Development Bank in the Philippines; Commonwealth Development Corp. in the United Kingdom; and International Finance Corp. and Gonofone in the United States. He attracted these investors by complementing his vision with a practical distribution scheme whereby small entrepreneurs, backed by loans from Grameen Bank, could retail telephone services to their surrounding communities.
# posted by Unknown : Monday, January 02, 2006
