Orange bets on flexibility as key to Max It's success

One of the technologies on show during Orange's recent Open Tech Days event in Paris was the Max It super app, which is being gradually rolled out in the Middle East and Africa region (MEA). During a keynote conversation between CTIO Bruno Zerbib and Brelotte Ba, deputy CEO and chief operating officer for Orange MEA, the conversation turned to the group's innovation strategy and priorities underpinning the app as well as its broader activities in the region.

A super app combines multiple services in a single platform. The most successful example is Chinese WeChat, which allows users to send messages, make payments and connect with others through a social network. It is said to count over 1 billion users.

Max It, meanwhile, builds on Orange's existing apps, such as the My Orange subscription manager and the payments app Orange Money. It will also include e-commerce and digital content like gaming, ticketing and video. The group's existing apps will be gradually phased out as Max It gains traction with customers.

The super app was launched in Cameroon, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso and Botswana in November, as Light Reading's sister publication, Connecting Africa, reported at the time. Ba says that Max It will next become available in Tunisia, Morocco, Guinea and the Democratic Republic of Congo. By September next year, Orange expects it to be rolled out across the entire region.

The operator group has large ambitions for the app, saying it hopes to reach 45 million users by 2025. He said Orange has so far allocated around €10 million (US$10.9 million) per year as the app's budget for the first three years, during which time it will gauge Max It's potential for monetization. After that, the business plan will adapt for the app to be self-sustaining.

Orange is, however, targeting a longer lifespan, with Zerbib saying the company aims for the architecture to work for the next ten years. He seemed skeptical, however, about the potential for such a platform in other markets.

He argued that the concept of a super app has regional limitations due to cultural differences. He noted that while the concept has been very popular in China, there is little appetite for a similar app in Europe and North America. While media reports have emerged of the Tesla founder’s intentions to disprove this theory, Zerbib seems skeptical. "Elon Musk is trying to make a super app with X, good luck," he said.

Going local

Orange is betting on flexibility to ensure Max It's success in the MEA region. Local teams will be able to quickly add new functionalities, or mini-apps, to address the needs of their markets.

The telco emphasizes an individual approach to each market, granting local teams the autonomy to develop and introduce functionalities that are custom-built for their country to exist alongside the core functionalities, such as Spotify. This is done to address the diversity of conditions in individual markets, which Ba pointed out is one of the region's defining characteristics.

Ba noted that the region's diversity requires an individual approach in other activities. The 5G rollout, for example, could not be done in the same way in relatively sparsely populated countries like Botswana and denser markets including Egypt or Morocco.

He stressed that the group is already focusing heavily on areas outside of telecom in MEA. Apart from the success of Orange Money, which now counts 32 million monthly users, the operator has partnered with Brastorne on an agricultural platform offering a marketplace and social network functionalities to farmers in Botswana.

Orange has developed an ecosystem of startup partners in the MEA region, which Ba said will be key to create customized content for individual markets. It has introduced a number of initiatives like the Orange Summer Challenge and an entrepreneur prize. Ba highlighted the Orange Digital Center (ODC) initiative, which focuses on digital training and start-up support. 

The company currently counts 16 ODCs, of which 13 were established with German development agency GIZ. Ba says they have so far trained 1 million young people, while 226 start-ups went through an ODC accelerator. 

Startup ecosystem

Zerbib, meanwhile, emphasized the group's efforts to foster gender diversity in the region. He highlighted Women Digital Centers, which are part of the ODC initiative, as an important part of the group's strategy. At the same time, he noted that Orange has been successful in increasing the share of women employees, as well as the number of women in leadership roles.

Other types of inclusion are also being considered. While the app is currently only available in French, English and Arabic, work is underway to add more to respond to the region's linguistic diversity. Wolof and Lingala are slated to be added next, likely in the coming year, according to Ba. For illustration, Africa counts over 1,000 languages – although some only count a few hundred speakers – about a third of the global total. The group has also included icons in the app that should make it easier to navigate for those who struggle with reading.

Language diversity is also one of the focuses of Orange's research division. Speaking to journalists during the event, the group's SVP for research Jean Bolot said the company is trying to find ways to do deep learning with little data to overcome an issue when training natural language processing models on so-called sparse languages. These offer little to work with in terms of written corpus or spoken libraries, which is a challenge for the typically data-hungry generative AI.