As the CEO of Turkcell Group, Sureyya Ciliv sits at the helm of one of Europe's most important telecom giants. He is also a key player in the roaring Turkish economy. (Turkish GDP growth even outpaced China's earlier this year.) And that has put the 53-year-old executive in the position of offering some guidance to neighbors in the much-troubled Eurozone as well as to stagnating Western powers farther abroad. His idea? Privately funded investment in infrastructure.
Ciliv has the clout to be doling out advice. Since he was made CEO four years ago, Turkcell has grown from 44.9 million subscribers to 61.7 million in Turkey and eight other countries in the region. Ciliv pushed Turkcell into new markets, most recently Germany, while building on positions through its Fintur subsidiary and others. Overall, Turkcell leads the market in Turkey, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Northern Cyprus. It also has toeholds in Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova. In an August study, Turkcell's data download speeds in Turkey for phones on its 3G network were rated the fastest for those of 53 industrial nations -- including ones in North America -- by telecom giant Ericsson.
Now plugged into his home country's centers of power, Ciliv spent many years in the United States, graduating from Harvard Business School in 1983 before co-founding an information management solutions company, Novasoft Systems. He left Novasoft in 1997 to head up Microsoft's (MSFT) operations in Turkey. By 2000, he'd risen to an executive role in worldwide sales and marketing back in Redmond, WA. He's been CEO of Turkcell, based in Istanbul, since January 2007.
Ciliv's pitch doesn't sound so different than something an executive might deliver to investors. "Turkey is something very simple, and yet very, very smart," Ciliv says, describing his country's remarkable development. At the center of that progress? Infrastructure projects -- and a lot of them. He's an ardent supporter of building everything from roads to hospitals and, naturally, fiber optics. He ticks off the main values on his fingers: boosting the national economy, driving local businesses and spurring employment. Ciliv is selling the efficacy of so-called build-operate-transfer (BOT) operations.
Americans are most likely to have encountered BOT projects in their cars. The emerging system through which private companies maintain toll roads in some states is a classic BOT model. Private firms get a concession to finance, build and operate the project for a period of time before giving it back to the public. In return, the government turns over otherwise unimproved public assets. Private companies benefit if they can recoup their investment and turn a profit; the government, meanwhile, avoids shelling out public funds. The model can work with many sectors, from the more straightforward, such as bridges, to complex projects like health clinics or data networks. Despite the success of BOT in Turkey, Australia and Japan, adoption in Europe and the United States still lags.
According to Ciliv, the system allows a government to be pro-business and keep its corporations competitive globally, while producing projects that directly help the public. Such tactics then encourage major players such as Turkcell to pursue additional infrastructure as confidence grows. Turkcell's voice business, for example, is flat, but the company is investing heavily in Turkey's booming smartphone and high-speed internet markets, where Ciliv's found more growth. That transition from "Silk Road" to "Fiber Road," depends on a fiber infrastructure 28,000 kilometers in length and growing, through aggressive investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in BOT projects. Hence Ciliv's faith.
