stc Group: DARE to Transform

Established as a government-owned entity in 1998, stc Group was the sole telecommunications operator in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Soon after it was privatized in 2003, regional players started entering the Saudi market. To deal with the competition and to align with the government’s ambitious long-term vision for the country, stc launched its DARE strategy in 2017 that focused on Digitizing operations, Accelerating the performance of core assets, Reinventing the customer experience, and Expanding the scale and scope of the business. This strategy was revised as DARE 2.0 in 2020 to create focus on a few big bets. The most ambitious part of the strategy was to expand the scale and scope with the aim of diversifying the business. The expansion was anchored in five key initiatives, referred to as “Big Bets.” One focused on scaling stc’s core telecom business beyond KSA. The others aimed to expand the Group’s scope into information technology, data centers, internet-of-things, and digital banking. The leadership team at stc had been allocating significant resources to the Big Bets, the bulk of the Group’s revenues still came from the Saudi market and its core telecom business, and there was no major appreciable change in stc’s share price after five years since the revised strategy’s launch.