Airtel Reshuffles Senior Mgt Staff for Africa Operations

Airtel Reshuffles Senior Mgt Staff for Africa Operations

Bharti Airtel, a leading global telecommunications services provider with operations in 20 countries across Asia and Africa, has announced top level changes for its Africa operations.

According to Airtel, the action is to further enhance the level of empowerment and enable faster decision making as well as speed to market, as the company also unveiled a new cluster based organisation design.

Chief Executive Office of Airtel Africa, Christian de Faria, has been elevated to the position of Executive Chairman, Airtel Africa. In his new role, he will continue to support the vision of Airtel Africa and lead all matters relating to legal, regulatory affairs, shareholders as well as mergers and  acquisitions.

Raghunath Mandava, who is currently the Director, Customer Experience, India and South Asia, will take over as Chief Operating Officer, Airtel Africa.

Also, Raghunath will relocate to Nairobi and be fully responsible for the commercial operations.

Raghu joined Airtel in 2003 and has served as Director-Operations (India); Chief Marketing Officer (India); CEO – Rajasthan Circle (India) and COO-Tamil Nadu Circle (India).

Prior to joining Airtel, Raghu worked in Unilever in several sales and marketing roles. He is a B.Tech in Electronics from IIT, Kharagpur (1988 batch) and an MBA from IIM- Bangalore (1990 batch).

Commenting on the organisational changes, Chairman, Bharti Airtel, Mr. Sunil Bharti Mittal, said: “Christian has done an excellent job by streamlining the operations, strengthening the leadership teams across Africa while enhancing the image of Airtel brand across Africa.

“We believe we have a strong platform to accelerate our journey towards profitability and market leadership and the new cluster based organisation design will provide an enabling environment to the teams.

“The appointment of Raghu will also help leverage the platform and sharpen our market focus and strengthen the innovation pipeline. We remain fully committed to Africa and will continue to invest in the growth of our operations.”