Ahmed Abdelsattar joined the Prysmian Group through the 3rd wave of Build the Future, in 2014. Find out what he does within the Group and what his experience is.
What do you do and why is it important?
I am currently working as a Financial Reporter and Projects Analyst in Singapore, ASEAN’s HQ.
The ASEAN region is one of the most challenging for the whole Group. A region that has plants in 5 different countries reporting with various currencies and completely different business environments adds a high level of complexity and importance of the results consolidation and financial analysis undertaken before reporting to Milan in a simplified standard format with a unified currency for one region.
What is your team like?
I am working closely with the ASEAN CFO as my direct boss and I am part of his ASEAN regional financial team that includes a regional business controller, treasurer and credit controller. The team including myself comes from UK, Singapore, Malaysia and Egypt so it’s a multicultural team with a great spirit. Everyone learns and adds value on daily basis through working closely together on lots of challenging tasks.
How have you developed in your role?
Lots of skills are being developed; I would highlight mainly meeting the frequent demanding deadlines constantly with holding an unparalleled high level of accuracy in delivering.
What is the best thing about your job?
It is simply the impressive exposure of the role. It is not a standing-alone reporting function; however, I am getting involved in a bunch of activities like investments controlling, analysis of Operating Net Working Capital (ONWC), cash management, treasury and banking relationships. It is a wide array of responsibilities running together so I am witnessing a significant learning curve while at the same time encountering many potential areas to add value to.
What has been your most rewarding project so far?
I have got the chance to work on several rewarding projects. To name the biggest on my list, it would be the Operating Net Working Capital (ONWC) analysis for ASEAN. The most rewarding projects I encounter are those who make me feel challenged; the preceding mentioned project is one of those. To do such analysis, one needs a solid technical background in parallel to an excellent business understanding. Getting lost between the bits and pieces of the whole picture and tracing the different correlations of the ONWC constituents to reach at the end well-constructed analysis for the whole region is absolutely rewarding.
What is the international environment like?
Singapore is a melting point for numerous cultures; the business reflects that image and the personal life as well. Interacting with a big variety of backgrounds day in day out is a very rich experience that brings marvelous skills on board.
What does your future look like?
I am aiming at an outstanding career-path full of new challenges, roles, relocations and higher responsibilities within the Prysmian Globe. A noteworthy near future event is getting married soon to my first love in Egypt. I am lucky to have her willing to join me in Singapore and throughout our –hopefully- promising future.
Why would you recommend Prysmian to a young talent?
Prysmian is a world connector with significant presence almost everywhere in the world. As the cables industry global leader; our core is connecting the people via every single telecom and energy industry. The previously mentioned is what grabbed my interest as a young talent. As a career starter, you would leverage on that huge presence and get exposed to the widest array of fields you can ever imagine. Either you are engineering or a business graduate; you can never end up not finding the convenient spot in Prysmian. What gives Prysmian Graduates a higher edge over other graduate programs is having a mentor by your side for any issue that you come across through your career path. You could always ask your mentor’s guidance or advice for personal and professional situations and make use of his/her rich experience. International assignments and promising future positions make the program a right choice to kick off an unparalleled experience.
Andreas Bott, Group Controller, has been Ahmed’s mentor since he joined the company.
Andreas, which are Ahmed’s skills and how a young talent could contribute to the business?
Ahmed has the right educational background to quickly feel confident in a numbers driven environment like Finance & Controlling. On top of that Ahmed has the right passion and dedication to understand better and better what is behind the numbers, to understand the value drivers of our business. He is skilled to ask the right questions and –what is often even more important– to listen. He also understood very quickly that Prysmian is hierarchically very lean organized. Ahmed is seeing this as an opportunity to get quickly not only a deep business knowledge but also takes this as a chance to be right away involved in the decision making processes. Last and maybe most important to mention is the international mindset of Ahmed. We as a multinational company need people who feel confident working in different locations around the world. Who represents this better than Ahmed, born in Egypt, international academic education, working with Prysmian in Germany and now leaving his footprint in the Asean Region.
