Egypt’s state-owned landline telecom monopoly Telecom Egypt has appointed Waleed Gad as its new chairman to replace Mohamed Salem, who stayed in office for just four years before resigning last week.
Gad was appointed to the company’s board of directors in 2012 and has worked in information technology for 48 years, holding various management positions at Fujitsu Services, according to Reuters.
Salem resigned on Saturday shortly after a new government was sworn in, saying he faced many stumbling blocks and difficulties in trying to improve the company’s performance.
The company, 80 per cent owned by the Egyptian government, has been hoping to acquire an integrated license which enables it to operate mobile networks, but the government had put the plan on ice due to disagreements between the government and the three existing mobile carriers, Mobinil, Etisalat and Vodafone Egypt.
This came despite statements by the National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA) that optical fiber modernization enables the infrastructure to introduce the fourth mobile operations license. It is worth mentioning that TE owns 45 per cent of Vodafone Egypt.
TE introduced earlier this year a wide marketing campaign that succeeded in adding 240,000 new subscribers to the fixed line customers to reach 6.7 million by the end of June 2015.
Moreover, TE’s ADSL subscribers grew by 24 per cent to reach 2.4 million, dominating Egypt’s ADSL market with a 70 per cent market share, backed by the optical fiber modernization.
Prime securities expects TE’s revenue to show further improvements across all business units for 2015 to record LE11.6 billion, albeit lower than 2014 due to the LE0.9 billion cable projects revenues recognised in 2014.
Net Profit is anticipated to record LE2.3 billion in 2015, an 11 per cent growth over 2014, due to several one-offs recognised in 2014.
