Kenya’s telecom giant, Safaricom, has declared Cynthia Karuri-Kropac as the new Chief Enterprise Business Officer, effective September 1, 2022. The former director of IoT technologies at AT&T is to replace Joseph Wanjohi, who has been acting since May.
The new hire comes as Sylvia Mulinge left Safaricom for MTN Uganda. While present, she served as Chief Consumer Business Officer and is currently the Chief Executive of operations, and will help the Telco grow its regional business and help sustain its position.
As of this writing, Karuri-Kropac’s LinkedIn page noted that she has served AT&T for 15 years and 8 months in different capacities. She was first of all the company’s IT Strategist for eighteen months (Jan 2007 – Jun 2008). She was then promoted to Director Global Operations in Jul 2008 and served for almost a decade.
In January 2018, Karuri-Kropac became AT&T’s Director Sales – Wireless and IOT Solution where she served for another 4 yrs plus. This role saw her master proficiency of the underlying technologies that support AT&T products, services and applications (e.g., 5G, Mobility, IoT, Mobility as a Service architectures and enterprise integration), amongst others.
“With over 20 years of experience in the telecommunications sector, Cynthia has a wealth of knowledge in various crafts, including business strategy, industrial IoT, enterprise technology solutions, executive advisory and decision support, operational excellence and process reengineering,” Safaricom said in a tweet on Wednesday.
Safaricom has been doing a lot in terms of how its management team dispenses services to its customers.
The telecom giant has the highest number of customer subscriptions for mobile services, mobile money, and other enterprise services, not to mention the lion’s share of revenues from the same market, has been making a lot of managerial changes ever since it received a new CEO Peter Ndegwa back in 2020.
Ms Karuri joins other new faces that have taken executive roles in the company in the last two years as the telco aims to enter new ventures to offset declining voice revenues.
More than half of Safaricom’s executives have quit the telco over the past two years, allowing CEO Peter Ndegwa who replaced Bob Collymore in April 2020 to build his own team.
Eight executives occupying the 11 C-suite seats at Safaricom have left during the period under review for roles outside the firm or at British Vodafone and South Africa’s Vodacom—which have a combined 40 percent stake in the Kenyan company.
This has allowed the firm to tap new skills in Kenya’s evolving telecoms market and shape the management in line with Mr Ndegwa’s strategy that seeks to maintain Safaricom’s profit trajectory.
Recent appointments at the firm point to a shift as the company targets new revenue streams and the growth of the mobile money platform.
Safaricom’s mobile money platform M-Pesa has overtaken voice to become the biggest revenue earner for the company.
