Celebrating Silver Jubilee of African Adventure in Telecom!

Time flies when you’re on an adventure! It’s been 25 years at East Africa & counting & most importantly enjoying. Many thanks to my family & friends, well-wishers for continuous support, guidance, & encouragement.

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As telecom is very dynamic sector, I believe “Riding the wave” with telecom trends from Enterprise domain to ISP to Telecom Infra to Big Data Analytics to Telecom TowerCo management really helped me to continuously grow in my professional career. ?

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My African Safari below in brief for my LinkedIn friends,

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Adaptation: My African adventure in Telecom started in Jan99 from a small city, Kisumu which is on the shore of Lake Victoria in Kenya. Professional & personal life were completely changed from Mumbai to Kisumu, lots of learnings & adaptations for Kenyan market. It was a very successful first year in the end for business while enjoyed travelling across beautiful Western Kenya, especially tea estates & Lake Victoria. But, one challenge was food while travelling being vegetarian & same time foodie!

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Growth: In 2000, with-in a year, I was promoted and had initiated the operations from scratch for Alcatel Lucent in Tanzania at Dar-es-Salaam and became the market leader within 5 years among competitors like Siemens, Avaya & Ericsson in enterprise domain. Swahili language was must for staying & doing business in Tanzania. Somehow, I just managed with few key words with my broken Swahili. It was exciting to witness rapid economic developments at Tanzania. I really enjoyed beautiful white sands beaches of Dar-es-Salaam & Zanzibar!

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Country Leadership Role: In 2007, I got an interesting opportunity to lead the country operation for one of the leading French groups ISP operations in Tanzania with a team of 25. It was a great experience managing the entire Tanzania operations with business development, marketing, sales, technical, finance, administration, human resource, legal & compliance. Turnover increased by 50% in the very first year of operation after taken charge. In 2010, first submarine cable came to East Africa and ISP business dynamics completely changed.

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African Regional Role: In 2010, I was approached by leading Indian Telecom Infra multinational to lead Africa business development initiative. I relocated to Nairobi, Kenya to the East African regional hub. I distinctively initiated business from scratch for all revenue stream services and got break through with leading OEMs like Nokia Siemens Networks, Huawei and Alcatel Lucent and Operator like Airtel, Safaricom, MTN, Vodacom etc. for all strategic revenue stream services like Network Deployment, Network Planning & Design, Managed Network Services (Operation & Maintenance) & Professional Services with-in a first year. Successfully boosted Year on Year growth (order booking & revenue) for Africa region and was part of a team who expanded business from 3 to 17 countries in Africa and revenue from 2 to 25 US$ M.

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Overall Management Consulting Company: In 2015, I decided to use my 15 years of African experience & start my own overall management consulting company in Kenya, mainly focused for starting the business operations from scratch in Africa and expansion across African region. Now, successfully serving few leading global technology (Telecom & IT) organizations.

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After changing my address every decade. Now, I am settled at Nairobi for last 14 years. Nairobi has one of the best weathers in the world (among top 10) on altitude of 5,889 feet from sea-level.

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While Kenya is popular for Masai Mara, Mt. Kenya, Mombasa etc. Kenya is also golfers’ paradise and home of many beautiful golf courses; one can play any time of the day due to moderate & suitable weather with 10-25 C throughout the year.

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Kenyan are also popular for its "Happy Culture" & philosophy of “Hakuna Matata”.