Before settling for the telecom sector, Sergey Korobov weighed several other career options. These ranged from becoming an astronaut to being a skier. “Like most children living in the Soviet era, I too wanted to become an astronaut or a jet pilot. As I grew older, I explored the option of becoming a professional Alpine skier and spent seven years in the Olympic Alpine Skiing School. Then, my interest shifted and I wanted to take up architecture or designing. It was only in my final years of school that technology and telecom drew my attention,” he recalls.

Korobov graduated from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute with a degree in mobile communications. He also studied social sciences at at Moscow State University. “It was a great experience to study so many different subjects at the same time,” he says.

 Korobov started working while he was still a student in the final year of university. He joined MTS Russia in 1999 as head of the company’s expert group in its call centre division. After a few years, he moved to the company’s optimisation of business solutions division within the marketing function. Later, he took care of business analytics and ideation in product development. In 2007, he was appointed deputy product marketing director.

He moved to India in 2008 and joined Sistema Shyam TeleServices Limited (SSTL). “I thought moving to India was a great opportunity, both from a professional as well as a cultural point of view,” he says.

Today, as head of value-added services (VAS) and product development, Korobov is responsible for the operator’s core VAS offerings and product development. He says that identifying future growth areas and creating products that would enable SSTL to achieve its long-term goals are the main challenges before him. “For the past seven years, areas such as m-commerce, m-health, m-agriculture and cloud-based services have been analysed extensively by the industry. However, there aren’t many successful implementations for us to learn from. It is important to note that these products and services cannot be easily transplanted from one country to another without understanding the needs, culture and topography of the market.” However, SSTL he says is well poised to tackle these challenges.

While Korobov did not quite end up fulfilling his early ambition of becoming a professional skier, he does manage to pursue that passion. “Every winter, we go to the mountains, usually the Alps, and ski with friends and family. For me, spending time in the mountains is the ideal vacation,” he says.