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Firm Shrinks Telecom's Carbon Footprint
In Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous country and second largest market for Facebook, people connect often via inexpensive mobile phones from China more than by desktop or laptop computers. Global tech companies salivate about future profit growth there, according to the Economist magazine. Two GSB alums also see an opportunity to demonstrate the role telecommunications can play in reducing the strain of economic growth on the global environment.
A decade after they met at the business school in 1999, environmental advisor Andrew Malk and former investment banker Anindya Bakrie, both MBA '01, started discussing how environmental sustainability was changing the competitive landscape for corporations. By 2009, Malk had started Malk Sustainability Partners, a corporate advisory firm in San Diego, and Bakrie was CEO of Bakrie Telecom, the fourth largest mobile network operator in Indonesia and one of the Bakrie group of publicly traded companies. Like people elsewhere, the 11 million customers of Bakrie Telecom frequently bought new phones bundled with chargers they didn't need and just tossed their old phones.
During 8 months in 2010, Malk and Bakrie set up teams to explore ways to cut the telecom's carbon footprint and launched a program whose goals include reusing or recycling 50,000 mobile handsets annually, reusing or recycling 75% of the company's network and IT electronic waste, and cutting in half its greenhouse gas emissions per subscriber by 2014.
Among 60 initiatives are several that also improve the customer experience: Customers now have the choice to buy a new phone without a new charger, and new phones are built to notify users when the phone is fully charged, so the phones don't draw unnecessary electrical current. Less visible to customers but also important: Cellular base-station equipment now is cooled with ambient air instead of air conditioning, and reverse supply chains have been organized for recycling or reusing discarded mobile devices.
Malk says the GSB's education model should get part of the credit for what the two are doing. "Our partnership demonstrates what can be accomplished when you bring together capable people from different sectors of society to join in taking common management training."