Arris looks to eastern European growth

Following its US$2.2 billion (€1.7 billion) acquisition of Motorola Home earlier this year, Arris is looking to Turkey and Russia as key growth markets. 

Speaking at Arris-Motorola’s Video Leadership Forum event in Berlin, Steve McCaffrey, Arris’ senior vice-president of EMEA and former Motorola vice-president, said that the combined business was also looking to end-to-end multiscreen, broadband evolution and headend evolution to grow its business.

“The key growth markets for us that we’re putting a lot of time and resource into are Turkey and Russia, because there’s a dynamic about those market places – there’s a huge amount of growth,” said McCaffrey.

He said that Turkey’s broadband penetration currently stands at around 24%, but that the government is planning to boost that to 46% by 2016.

“That’s a phenomenal amount of growth – and of course they’re going to have to look for services that is going to pull through that broadband investment and video is a key component of that,” said McCaffrey.

He also pointed to countries like South Africa and the Ukraine as providing DVB-T opportunities as they switch from analogue to digital in the coming years. Earlier this month Arris did a deal with Polish operator Vectra to supply it with a hybrid HD set-tops to transition its analogue subscribers to digital.

Outside of individual products and regions, McCaffrey said that focusing on the trio of end-to-end multiscreen, broadband and headend evolution, would allow Arris “to make a step-change to our business.”

In terms of the latter he said: “You’re seeing headends change drastically – there’s an inflection point in technology going from encoding to transcoding, going from 40 channel systems, to 100 channel systems to full OTT type services.” McCaffrey added that end-to-end multiscreen is an issue that “every operator – cable and telco – is talking about.”