Europe: Orange selects French treasury head as its next CFO

The Orange Group has named Ramon Fernandez, the current director general of the French treasury, as its next CFO. Fernandez will start his new position on Sept. 1. The current CFO, Gervais Pellissier, will take over the management of Orange’s European Zone, which also includes EE in the United Kingdom, Orange’s joint venture with Deutsche Telekom.
The selection of Fernandez, who has an extensive background in government, but no telecom experience, further cements the relationship of the Orange Group with the French government. The leading carrier in France, Orange developed out of the state-controlled France telecom and the French government still owns 27% of the company.
Orange also announced that Laurent Paillassot, a banking executive, will become senior executive VP of customer experience and mobile banking.
The two appointments are part of a management shuffle orchestrated by current CEO Stéphane Richard, whose looking to shore up the companies profits, particularly in light of the highly competitive market in France. In its first quarter report, Orange posted further declines, but stabilized margins.
More telecom news from Europe:
Telefónica, Red Hat and Intel partnered to create next-generation virtualized network services. The three companies announced plans to create open source solutions for network function virtualization in Telefónica’s NFV Reference Lab.
France’s Bouygues Telecom chooses Ericsson for VoLTE. No. 3 French opertors Bouygues, selected Ericsson as its vendor to launch voice over LTE services. With this service, Bouygues mobile customers will have access to high-definition voice conversations, shorter call set-up times and enhanced communications services such as video calling over LTE.
Telekom Austria board takes “neutral” stand on América Móvil bid: Telekom Austria’s management and supervisory boards decided to give no recommendation towards América Móvil’s bid to buy up the remaining shares of the company. América Móvil plans to pay up to $2 billion for the shares.
EE brings MobileIron Cloud to the U.K.  EE partnered with MobileIron to launch a enterprise mobility management platform for small to medium businesses designed to provide simplified security and control of mobile devices. EE, the largest mobile carrier in the United Kingdom, also reached a milestone last week as more customers signed up for LTE services than its 3G offering.
 
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