Mr. Shaikh Abdulla bin Khalid Al Khalifa

Panelist, Director of Communications and Investor Relations, Zain Bahrain

Shaikh Abdulla is the Chief Communications and Investor Relations Officer at Zain Bahrain. With more than 20 years of experience in Telecoms and IT, Shaikh Abdulla has held key positions that have given him insight into the communications, finance, technical, legal and compliance aspects of the field. Before joining Zain, he was previously Executive Director for Technology & Innovation at the University College of Bahrain for 4 years, where he mainly focused on transforming the university into a 21st century academic institution, with initiatives such as shifting applications to the cloud, implementing a cloud-based new learning management system, and redesigning the campus network infrastructure.
Prior to joining the university, Shaikh Abdulla spent 8 years at Lightspeed Communications, a Bahrain-based telecoms start-up, as Co-Founder, CEO, and Vice President. He successfully managed in launching the Kingdom’s first dual-play voice and internet service back in 2007. He also successfully partnered with Jordan Telecom, acquiring 51% of the start-up company, thereby becoming an affiliate of a multinational telecoms corporation, France Telecom Group.
Prior to starting up the telecoms company, Shaikh Abdulla started his career working for 2 years at Batelco as a Regulatory and Compliance Specialist. He gained his knowledge and experience in the regulatory and compliance field at the time when the telecoms market just started to fully liberalise back in 2002.
Shaikh Abdulla holds an Executive MBA from the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland and a Bachelors in Computer Information Systems from Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA.