Vodafone restructured, new shareholders to take over soon
Vodafone Zambia Acting Chief Executive Officer – CEO Gilbert Temba confirmed that Vodafone is currently being restructured and will soon be announcing its new CEO after the exit of its first CEO Lars Stock.
Temba has also confirmed that all Vodafone employees will be paid their salary arrears as soon as the company concludes its transitional plan. He said it is a priority for Vodafone to ensure that its staff are paid their dues, and that information has already been communicated to all to this effect.
In an exclusive interview with the Zambian Business Times – ZBT on the morning of 11 June, Temba stated that Vodafone staff remain passionate about driving business forward. He further said that business at the institution has continued to experience stability and growth as customers are joining the network on a daily basis.
“Our average revenue per user (ARPU) remains unchanged, our subscriber base and credit usage continues to grow. Business continues as usual” Temba said.
He also said Vodafone will announce the new CEO and other structural changes including new ownership of the Zambian operation, when the board concludes its deliberations, as no time-frame has been attached to it yet.
Temba further clarified that Lars Hendrik Storks resignation was part of a transition plan, that was agreed upon over 2 years ago. Storks (67), retirement was announced on Wednesday, June 6, 2018 by the current Board Chairperson.
The Board and Management thanked Lars Stork for his service to the company and wished him the best in his future endeavors. Vodafone Zambia is one of Zambia’s largest ISPs and was recently granted authority by the Regulator ZICTA to start providing LTE services in Zambia.
Vodafone is famed to have disrupted the Zambian mobile internet and data services when the company launched the first super-fast services when major mobile networks such as MTN and Airtel were providing relatively slower services.
It is the disruption that Vodafone introduced on the Zambian market that have been praised to have ignited and made all mobile internet and data players in Zambia to improve on data/internet download speeds and service levels.
With the Voice over IP license granted to Vodafone, many await to see the playout of the data based route that the telecom has taken to penetrate the market. The mobile service provider has over 350,000 subscribers and with the coming of UZI, Zambia’s data landscape and competition in the sector is set to widen and cause more price disruptions. Zambia’s licensing framework was last year converged and approved by the Ministry of Communications in a step to exterminate barriers to entry that saw restrictions collapsed. This was a replication of the East African model that has aided to lower operational costs in the sector.