The second quarter saw quite some momentum in the telecom space with companies restructuring and rejiggering its top management. From major restructuring of its operations to new hires, companies like Bharti Airtel and Reliance sought out to bring fresher perspectives from top leaders into its fold to tackle its strategies for the year’s remaining quarters.
Bharti Airtel
The Indian telecom major restructured its Indian and South Asian operations. Aimed at driving greater business and functional synergies, providing a common interface to customers, and creating a delayered and more agile organization, the transformed organization structure that took effect Aug. 1, had two distinct customer business units with focus on B2C and B2B segments.
The B2C business unit led by K. Srinivas combined the previous business units mobile, telemedia, digital TV, and other emerging businesses (such as M-commerce, M-health, M-advertising), while the B2B business unit headed by Drew Kelton will continue its focus on serving large corporate and carriers through Bharti Airtel’s portfolio of telecommunication services.
Market operations in India and South Asia were also divided in three regions, each headed by an operations director: Ajai Puri heading the North, East and Bangladesh; Vineet Taneja heading South and Sri Lanka; and operations in the West headed by Raghunath Mandava.
Following these announcements it also announced the appointment of Anant Arora as CEO of the company’s B2C operations in Gujarat circle.
SSTL / MTS
Sistema Shyam Teleservices Ltd. (SSTL), the mobile joint venture between Russia’s Sistema and Shyam Group of India, expanded its nine-member board by inducting four new directors. This move saw two Sistema management board members, Feliks Evtushenkov and Alexey Buyanov, appointed as SSTL directors and former Tata Sky Managing Director and CEO Vikram Kaushik and Indian Society of Advertisers Chairman Bharat Patel brought in as independent directors.
SSTL also had two new chief operations officers for two of its major circles with ex-COO of Tata Teleservices for Orissa, Ashish Bhatia, taking up the role in Gujarat and T. Sridhar joining the Tamil Nadu Circle as COO.
Nokia Siemens Network
NSN announced the appointment of Sandeep Girotra to lead its business in India effective Oct. 1, with Girotra reporting to Ashish Chowdhary, head of customer operations east and a member of the company’s executive board, has been acting as head for its India business since January.
Reliance GlobalCom
RCom brought former top Verizon executive Rory Cole on board as president of carrier and ISP and also brought in former AT&T executive V.S, Gopinath as president and COO of enterprise for Globalcom.
Vodafone
Vodafone PLC moved its group head for mergers and acquistions, Colman Deegan, to Mumbai to plan and execute the listing of its Indian operations, taking over as chief financial officer for the telecom’s Indian operations.
Qualcomm
Qualcomm Inc. appointed Avneesh Agrawal, its senior vice president of product management at Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, as its senior vice president and president of Qualcomm India and South Asia. Kanwalinder Singh, senior vice president of Qualcomm and president of Qualcomm India, was appointed senior vice president of business development in the newly created new markets group within Qualcomm CDMA Technologies.
Others
In July, Alcatel-Lucent India announced the appointment of veteran telecom leader Arun Seth as chairman of Alcatel-Lucent India. Other notable changes included Sharad Gulla joining the Aricent Group, a global innovation and technology services company, as vice president of procurement and sourcing.
Mobile Social Media and VAS vendor Kirusa appointed Atanu Mandal as managing director. During its annual general body meeting, COAI, India’s leading cellular industry association, elected Himanshu Kapania, managing director of Idea Cellular, as vice chairman and re-elected Sanjay Kapoor, Bharti Airtel’s CEO of India and South Asia, as chairman for next year.
