Turkcell Wins GSMA's Global Mobile Award with “Dream Partner” for the Visually Impaired

Turkcell (NYSE:TKC) (BIST:TCELL), Turkey’s leading telecommunication and technology company, won a prestigious Global Mobile Award with "My Dream Partner" - Turkcell's service for the visually impaired. The service was chosen as the “Best Mobile Service for Accessibility or Ease-of-use” in the category of "Social and Economic Development" by the GSMA.

Turkcell CEO Sureyya Ciliv and Chief Consumer Marketing Officer Burak Sevilengul celebrated My Dream Partner's Global Mobile Award at Turkcell's Mobile World Congress booth. (Photo: Business Wire)

Turkcell’s “Dream Partner” - a cooperation between the company and Young Guru Academy- enriches and facilitates the lives of thousands of visually impaired individuals in Turkey. Subscribers of the service can access daily news, columnist pieces that appear in daily newspapers, thousands of books, location services, education and entertainment content in audio format. The library of "My Dream Partner" contains 5000 audio books and is 3 times larger than the average volume of similar platforms. Through its speech-to-text technology, users of the service can take and share notes faster and with greater independence.

"My Dream Partner" is available to a wide mobile customer base as an IVR service as well as an iOS- and Android-compatible application. The award-winning service is currently serving 6,250 subscribers with an average of 7,500-minutes-a-day total listening time.

Burak Sevilengul, Chief Consumer Marketing Officer at Turkcell, received the award in Barcelona. “Our priority is to create a difference in the lives of our customers through services that speak to their individual needs. We are happy to have facilitated and enriched the lives of thousands of Turkcell customers with "My Dream Partner". Winning an award in such a meaningful category with this service contributes to our enthusiasm to introduce further innovative services" said Sevilengul upon receiving the award.

Turkcell’s free-of-charge service “My Dream Partner” was launched in 2012 and has served the visually impaired with more than 350 thousand calls that add up to about 2 million minutes. The project is also considered to be exported and implemented in Ukraine.

Turkcell's Smart Map service for its corporate customers and SMS+ were also finalists at the Global Mobile Awards.

ABOUT TURKCELL: Turkcell is the leading communications and technology company in Turkey, with 35.2 million subscribers as of December 31, 2013. Turkcell is a leading regional player, with market leadership in five of the nine countries in which it operates with its approximately 71.3 million subscribers as of December 31, 2013. It has become one of the first among the global operators to have implemented HSPA+. It has achieved up to 43.2 Mbps speed using the Dual Carrier technology, and is continuously working to provide the latest technology to its customers. Turkcell Superonline, a wholly owned subsidiary of Turkcell, is the first telecom operator to offer households fiber broadband connection at speeds of up to 1,000 Mbps in Turkey. As of December 2013, Turkcell’s population coverage is at 99.49% in 2G and 86.17% in 3G. Turkcell reported a TRY11.4 billion (US$6.0 billion) revenue with total assets of TRY21.3 billion (US$10.0 billion) as of December 31, 2013. It has been listed on the NYSE and the ISE since July 2000, and is the only NYSE-listed company in Turkey. Read more at www.turkcell.com.tr

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