FINANCE
Uniting interests Representing the interests and helping to converge the movements of key industry players are associations , both on national and global scales .
Spanning more than 220 countries and serving nearly 800 companies is the GSMA , chaired by Telenor Group ’ s President and CEO Jon Fredrik Baksaas since 2002 . The association carries out activities and provides expertise in an
Jon Fredrik Baksaas CEO of Telenor Group enormous variety of areas , from public policy and apps guidelines to disaster response and security .
One of its key missions is to deliver “ ubiquitous mobile broadband access ” across the world , and its Spectrum team is dedicated to organising key industry events to help channel the activities of operators towards this end .
The Mobile World Congress epitomises this , with “ connecting the underserved ” a major topic for the 2015 event to be held in Barcelona at the beginning of March , boasting some of the most important figures in the telecoms and internet space as keynote speakers .
Overall , more than 1,900 companies are expected to exhibit , including recently confirmed brands such as China Mobile , Ericsson , Fujitsu , Gemalto , General Motors , MasterCard , Mozilla , Nokia , NTT DOCOMO and Visa .
Key to empowering the unconnected will be smartphones according to the GSMA ’ s Chief Strategy Officer Hyunmi Yang . “ As our study shows , smartphones will be the driving force of mobile industry growth over the next six years , with one billion new smartphone connections expected over the