Member Article

Behind the business with Comtek

Askar Sheibani is the chief executive of Deeside-based telecoms and IT specialist repair service firm, Comtek, as well as an entrepreneur and fully-trained engineer. He took Bdaily behind the business to find out more.

What key challenges has your company recently faced?

As a business which relies on the skills and expertise of engineers, we have found that our growth has been hampered due to the lack of such highly skilled professionals within the telecoms sector.

Comtek is working directly with the local community to reverse this trend, actively investing in an apprenticeship scheme and working on local entrepreneurial activities to develop the leaders of tomorrow and the skills needed to keep companies, such as ours, growing.

What is your biggest achievement over the past 12 months?

Comtek has achieved a great deal in the past year, however, our recent expansion into Belfast is our biggest accomplishment. Comtek has established a dedicated Nortel repair lab, housed in Nortel’s former Northern Ireland headquarters in Belfast.

Nortel’s demise in 2009 left behind a multitude of end-users with inadequate support services. By re-using Nortel’s technology, as well as Belfast’s local pool of talent, Comtek is able to deliver Nortel repair services on an international scale and continue to provide support for Nortel end-users.

What is your most important focus for the coming year, and what do you hope to achieve?

The nature of our business is such that our services are applicable to an international market. We offer specialist repair services on IT and telecoms equipment that extends the working life of customer’s equipment.

Our expertise in Nortel equipment is unrivalled, resulting in increased demand for our services from Nortel’s previous international market base. Therefore, our key focal point this year is to aggressively promote our global export business through a targeted marketing campaign to boost awareness of our services.

What excites you most about your industry and business?

The telecommunications industry is constantly evolving. The development of new technology, and the impact that this has on businesses and consumers is what keep this sector interesting.

As a business, our engineers are having to keep pace with this change, to ensure that we offer the breadth of expertise that our customers demand and offer the support required by their business.

I truly believe this to be one of the most fascinating industries and being part of it and taking advantage of the opportunities available in new international territories, is very exciting.

What do you wish you’d known when starting out?

I started Comtek from my garden shed in Reading in the late 1980s with £50 in my pocket and no bank willing to support my big idea. Today, Comtek has close to 150 employees, operations across Europe and serves an international customer base – something which I never could have anticipated.

When I began the business, there was no way of predicting its success and longevity in the field. I was just passionate about the service I was offering.

Now as Comtek looks to embark on an international campaign to promote our export services, I would have liked to have known when I started that there would be such a substantial market for Comtek’s service – despite the initial knock-back from the banks!

What will be the “next big thing“ in your industry, and how do you plan to handle it?

The application of graphene based technologies will have a revolutionary impact on the telecoms industry and is set to be the next hot technology trend. Graphene is a flat sheet of carbon, one-atom thick and is almost completely transparent.

It’s 100 times stronger than steel but thinner than any known solid. Since graphene is a super conductor, reports suggest that it could lead to the development of flexible cell phone touchscreens and transparent, inexpensive solar cells.

At Comtek, we are already in communication with local universities about this technology and are closely monitoring developments within the industry with keen interest.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Miranda Dobson .