Waleed Al-Khashti and Eman Al-Saidi from Zain KSA receive the Best Brand Award.

DUBAI: Zain Group, a leading mobile telecom innovator in seven markets across the Middle East and Africa, announced its Zain brand has been identified as the 'Best Brand' for telecom in the Middle East for 2021 at the Telecom Review Summit Excellence Awards gala ceremony held in Dubai on 8 December 2021. Zain Saudi Arabia was also awarded 'Best 5G User Growth' and 'Most Innovative Service' for its Yaqoot mobile-only platform.

Telecom Review is a leading industry publication, and the award recognizes the outstanding performance of Zain's brand across all its markets, which has come to represent the highest standard of customer service across all of its touch-points. Winners were chosen based on demonstrable capabilities in their specific sector by an independent panel of 15 experienced industry veterans.

Zain has been a recipient of the 'Best Brand' accolade at other regional events in the past, confirming the success of its media campaigns, corporate sustainability, and diversity and inclusion initiatives, as well as its ongoing innovation and investment in network upgrades. These factors combined have resulted in exceptional customer experience since the introduction of the Zain brand in 2007, making it one of the most respected and recognized corporate brands in the Middle East and Africa.

Zain remains passionate about forging strong partnerships and bringing new dynamic services to its customers, evident by the recent launch of Zain Esports and the expansion of Zain's API platform in offering unique and appealing content and gaming services. Zain also recently launched Zain Ventures to reinforce its efforts in the startup ecosystem, as well as launching ZainTech to offer enterprises and governments across the region unique, one-stop shopping across the full stack of ICT services.

The company's marketing campaigns across the region on various media channels have captured the hearts and minds of millions of people. Zain's Ramadan and Eid television commercials this year received a remarkable 20 million views on YouTube, indicative of the brand power of Zain. Today, Zain Group and its local operations boast over 12 million fans on Facebook, more than seven million followers on Twitter, 2.4 million on Instagram and 665,000 on LinkedIn, totaling 22 million fans. Annually, Zain Group and its operations' numerous YouTube channels receive in excess of 100 million views.

Zain was also the first operator to launch commercial 5G networks in both Kuwait (June 2019) and Saudi Arabia (October 2019), followed by Bahrain (June 2020); developments that are positively impacting customer experience and innovation. Sustainability, transparency, and thought leadership lie at the core of Zain's business and this is reflected in every aspect of the company's day-to-day operational activities.

Zain's annual Sustainability Report highlights the company's continued regional leadership in pursuing its sustainability agenda and supporting the communities it serves through outreach activities such as climate change, children's rights, capacity-building, education, socio-economic development, and environmental stewardship. Zain's diversity and inclusion program has also proven extremely successful in further motivating employees given it is one of the most progressive of any entity in the region.

COVID-19 measures to connect with consumers

As a brand that cares deeply about the community it serves, Zain took proactive measures across its footprint to ensure the needs and challenges that our communities faced during the global pandemic were catered to, granting them increased digital access to everyday activities and essential medical and commercial services. March 2020 to September 2021 was a mission-critical period as all Zain operations were focused on providing meaningful connectivity during lockdowns to minimize the impact of the pandemic on everyday life..

The Telecom Review Summit Excellence Awards ceremony saw Zain Saudi Arabia awarded 'Best 5G User Growth' accolade for reaching new heights in the Saudi telecom market, having established itself as the leading provider of 5G services in the Kingdom, having one of the largest 5G networks across the globe. Zain Saudi Arabia's digital-only mobile platform Yaqoot witnessed enormous growth during 2021, counting over one million installations of the app, and offering customer centric services such as eSIM, Apple Pay, and a chatbot services, as well as coordinating the delivery of SIMs to over 170 cities in the Kingdom.