Not enough focus on Cell C performing

The head of SA’s third-largest cellphone operator, Cell C, has laid the blame for the operator’s dismal financial state on its previous management.

Douglas Craigie Stevenson, appointed as CEO of Cell C in August, said on Thursday the mobile operator had “from 2001, its launch ... always struggled in the market. I don’t think anyone is under [any] illusion.”

He was speaking at the results presentation of Blue Label Telecoms, which owns 45% of Cell C.

“I really attribute it to two fundamentals,” he said. “The company has never really focused on performance and performance management. A performance culture is something that is really important for a business such as this, and the devil is really in a lot of the detail. We’ve got a huge amount of transactions going through and you have to have a management team that understands everything and is focused.”

Craigie Stevenson has had a tough job from the start. In July, the company said it had asked law firm Bowmans to investigate business units possibly involved in “irregular” practices. This adds to the woes facing Cell C, whose debt rating was downgraded in late June by S&P Global Ratings to reflect a default becoming “a virtual certainty”.

“We have had a lot of bad transactions in the organisation. At the time when we signed the ATC tower agreement in 2011, it looked wonderful, but the truth of the matter is that it put us under a lot of financial pressure.

“A lot of the work that me and my management team are doing is about getting us to a clean basis where we can start operating at an efficient level.”

Craigie Stevenson has been Cell C’s interim CEO since March. He joined the operator in October 2017 as COO. He took over from previous head, Jose Dos Santos who stepped down in March after being in the role since 2014.

A HUGE AMOUNT OF TRANSACTIONS ARE GOING THROUGH AND YOU NEED A MANAGEMENT TEAM THAT UNDERSTANDS EVERYTHING