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Safaricom approach revamps top telecom
NEWS ANALYSIS | IAN KATUSIIME | MTN Uganda CEO Sylvia Mulinge is having quite the start to the new year. MTN just made a profit of Shs641bn—a 30% increase–from last year’s earnings of Shs493bn. In February she was named CEO of the Year at the MTN Global Leadership Gathering in Johannesburg, South Africa. Mulinge emerged the best executive among the 20 African countries where MTN operates.
Two and a half years at the helm of MTN, Mulinge is creating a buzz on how she has revamped the culture at the largest telecommunications company and brought an air of optimism and a new vibe to an organisation that insiders say was groaning under the weight of complacency, internal bickering and foot dragging.
“She is a sales person; she is shrewd and aggressive,” an MTN staffer described her. One of Mulinge’s first actions was to restructure and merge departments to boost efficiency and enhance performance.
She introduced the idea of One Sales Team where all departments were geared to padding the company bottom line. The new CEO also created ‘Growth and New Business’ , a unit meant to drive innovation in a fast changing industry. She appointed Franklin Ocharo as its General Manager.
“She has brought the Safaricom approach,” says an insider in the telecom industry. Safaricom is the Kenyan telecom giant where Mulinge worked for fifteen years. Her immediate former position at Safaricom was Chief Consumer Business Officer.
Sources say she is not only proactive but counters everything rivals do in the market to keep MTN ahead of the curve. MTN’s main rival is Airtel in an industry where competition is at its peak over data, financial technology and other innovative products getting churned out by the day.
Industry sources say the aggressive Safaricom style is yielding dividends compared to the days when the company was led by South African CEOs who were said to be laid back and took comfort in the fact that they were market leaders.
MTN is headquartered in South Africa and since the company started operations in Uganda in 1998, the top executive always came from the Rainbow nation. The situation is not any different from Airtel whose parent company is Indian-owned. The company’s CEOs have always been expatriates.
For a change of strategy, the MTN Group turned to Sylvia Mulinge, a Kenyan national with an impressive track record in sales and marketing, to boost its Ugandan subsidiary. Immediately the appointment was made in August 2022, there was palpable anticipation for what the new executive had up her sleeve.
She took up the job two months later and kicked off a whirlwind of changes that have seen significant uptake in the company’s digital services and mobile money transactions. MTN divested its mobile money service into a fully independent company.
Strategy
Mulinge made immediate personnel changes by appointing new General Managers to scale and integrate service delivery across all departments. The key segments of Mobile Money and Data have registered exponential growth and are major cash cows. She is passionate about digital transformation which she has made a cornerstone of her leadership.
Mulinge’s growth strategy appears to have paid off: reporting for the financial year ending 2024 shows a data uptake of 22% and fintech up by 13.9%. MTN has 22 million mobile subscribers in total.
As is wont with new CEOs, she showed the door to a number of staff as she re-aligned the company structure to implement her vision and strategy.
Mulinge also got rid of events like the MTN Marathon which she deemed excess weight to focus on areas that would bring in extra earnings for the country’s largest corporation by a mile.
MTN raked in a cool Shs3.2tn in total revenue-–an 18% increase from the previous Shs2.6tn the year before. MTN paid out a total dividend of Shs506billion and declared a Shs1.3tn tax contribution to the government.
Players in the telecom industry including staff at MTN, those at rival firms; regulators, customers and business partners are now reckoning with the transformative leadership of Mulinge.
In her mid-forties and with a penchant for pant suits, the MTN CEO is reveling in the glow of the company’s bounce back after years of stagnant growth, a staid image and a slumped post Covid19 recovery.
Described as tough, pragmatic and clear-eyed on what her goals are, Mulinge gave a hint of what she has set her sights on when she released the annual report on March 6.
“MTN Uganda is not just a technology company; we are building the infrastructure for Uganda’s digital future while ensuring our business contributes meaningfully to communities and the environment,” she said.
At the end of 2023, she refurbished the work stations at the MTN head offices in Kampala with a bullpen look meant to sharpen creativity.
The bullpen is synonymous with Fortune 500 companies especially in the tech sector where productivity and increasing shareholder value is the strategic goal. The results have been paying off.
When MTN Uganda did its financial reporting at this time last year, it prompted a crisis meeting at Airtel where directors convened for a way forward. Mulinge has been deliberate about her growth strategy as seen from the changes she made to her ExCo and her hands-on management style pioneering new initiatives and products.
“The growth was delivered as a result of our focused investment in the network totalling Shs418billion. Our 45 and 5G population coverage increased to 87% and 15.3% respectively,” Mulinge said in her statement.
MTN was recognised at the 2024 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain for having the fastest network in Uganda and the fastest LTE network in Africa. The MWC is the Davos of the telecommunications industry.
Some analysts have compared Mulinge to one of her former bosses: former Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore who died in 2019 and is credited for the phenomenal growth of the Kenyan telecom company.
It was under Collymore that the world-renowned m-pesa was rolled out. Safaricom and MTN have a long running partnership that straddles both their voice calls and mobile money transfer services.
Like Mulinge, Collymore was a numbers person and sales was at the heart of his leadership of Safaricom. It is for this reason that industry insiders are saying Mulinge has brought the Safaricom philosophy to MTN.
MTN Airtel rivalry
Although the two telco giants MTN and Airtel have been locked in fierce competition for years, Mulinge’s time has sparked an even more intense rivalry between the two. The duopoly is said to be at its zenith after more than 25 years in the market.
MTN is known for its expansive and lavish approach where it splurges on marketing and branding while Airtel is renowned for its penny pinching penetration strategy targeting individual customers.
“You can see the difference even from service centers. MTN centers tend to be large while Airtel has smaller inches of space in its centres,” an industry source said. He added, “Airtel has one employee doing the work of what four people at MTN are doing.”
The war has extended to staff poaching between the two companies. In December 2024, MTN poached Dennis Kakonge from Airtel to take over as General Manager, Corporate Services and Company Secretary at MTN Mobile Money Uganda Limited. Kakonge was previously at MTN. The CEO of the MTN Mobile Money is Richard Yego who joined in the same year as Mulinge.
