One major challenge both new non-profits and for-profit startups have in common is being able to effectively justify their existence. It’s not easy, especially because it usually involves convincing influential stakeholders, that the traditional way of doing things is not always correct. Being innovative and keeping-up the pace with the technological advancements is equally important. Beyond business models and revenue projections, it is the passion, energy and tenacity of the entrepreneur that makes investors bet on their businesses. Abraham Punnoose, Managing Director at Celltick, is a very tenacious and passionate in his approach to anything he undertakes. Abraham possesses a make-it-happen, results oriented entrepreneurial spirit, balanced by a desire for excellence.
Celltick is an established leader in mobile marketing. The company drives discovery and engagement solutions and services for mobile operators, device manufacturers and app developers. Celltick’s managed solutions intelligently targets consumers in high growth markets on the home screen of their mobile devices, helping its partners around the globe to engage better with their users and thereby increase their revenues.
Abraham Punnoose – Business Role
Abraham is always looking for the best ways to move the company forward and grow the business in a profitable direction. Being the regional MD of the Indian Sub-Continent & Africa region, Abraham is responsible for the P&L, customer relationships, identifying new product opportunities, strategic partnerships, business development and most importantly people management. Celltick is the world’s largest phone home screen marketing company with access to hundreds of millions of mobile phones in over 25 countries and a global leader in mobile commerce and mobile coupons.
Under Abraham’s management, Celltick has expanded and deepened its partnerships with Operators, device manufacturers and media companies across the region. With over 20 years of experience in sales, marketing and business operations across telecom and retail banking, Abraham has proven experience in opening up telecom software markets globally for start-up companies and extensive domain knowledge in the wireless business.
The Global Leader in Mobile Marketing
Celltick was founded with a clear vision, i.e. to create solutions that engage users on their mobile devices. One of their leading products, START, is an Android interface that gives mobile operators, device manufacturers and media companies the ability to engage intelligently with their customers. START has over 60M installs, 15M MAU and keeps growing by 4M new installs per month. Celltick’s product, LiveScreen, is a patented platform designed specifically for operators on which they deliver a managed service that generates incremental revenue from mobile commerce and content distribution. With a customer base of over 250M users, Celltick enjoys the advantage of constant innovation and a near 100% market share on the LiveScreen business in India.
Celltick is rapidly growing with offices in Europe, Asia, South America and the U.S. Celltick has over a hundred operators and OEMs customers. The company has 130 employees, with its HQ in Israel and subsidiaries in Singapore, Mumbai, Moscow, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Their primary customers have been mobile operators, however, they are now exploring ways to add value to the payments vertical, enterprises and federal and state governments, given that the Celltick applet is now ubiquitous to the telecom landscape in the region. In doing so, they add value and revenue to their operator’s customers, making it a win-win situation for everyone in the ecosystem Celltick operates in.
Competence & Expertise
Abraham has a deep understanding of the mobile telecom business given his stints in both the operator and service provider environments. His ability to grasp a business problem and its challenges quickly is his biggest strength. Given his background in consumer & enterprise business globally he is able to draw up business plans across markets, visualizing a path to execute the plan and motivate his associates very effectively. Prior to joining Celltick, he served as VP Marketing & Business Development at Roamware which is now called Mobileum – a global company. He has also held management roles at international companies, such as Hutchison Telecom, HDFC Bank, American Express TRS and Lowe Lintas.
Abraham’s insights on the telecom business is a function of his global experience and his ability to quickly adapt to ever changing business dynamics and that his key professional strength
Celltick’s Value-driven Competent Team
At Celltick, Abraham encourages his team to have a healthy curiosity in their customers’ business with a view to helping them identify how they could solve business problems and add value & revenue to their business. This has been the key to finding strategic opportunities with their customers.
The key values that the team thrives on include; team work, focus, enabling support & equipping frontline team members, focusing on farming existing businesses, managing customer relationships hunting for strategic opportunities & partnerships in addition to the regular business development activities, and most importantly, an eye for detail for everything that matters to the business.
The value-driven perspective of the team has proven beneficial for the clients in helping them discover and monetize their services. Mobile operators spend millions of dollars in creating new products and services, and the key to success of these is based on discovery and adoption by the mobility consumers. At Celltick, the team strives to enable an efficient & non-intrusive discovery process of mobile consumers enabling hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue for their partners. One of the immediate areas where the team is helping their clients is in enabling a simple-to-use user interface for their payments services.
Future Aspects
As an organization, their focus has always been to create value for the ecosystem and add value to the end users of their primary customers, i.e. mobile operators & OEM’s / ODMs. Abraham and his team are now focused on creating value for enterprises and governments in partnership with Celltick’s customer base of mobile operators given the mass consumer presence of the Celltick app on consumer sim cards in the region. In the coming months they will also be focusing on marketing “Start magazine”, their new Content-as-a-Service (CaaS) platform to the Indian ecosystem with a special focus on app developers.
Abraham Punnoose: Leading the Pathway to Organizational Success
