SOUTH AFRICA – Network carriers & service provider SEACOM, has appointed Oliver Fortuin as the new group CEO, effective January 4, 2021. 

Fortuin has worked for over two decades in the ICT sector, across South Africa and the rest of Africa, with industry-leading organisations such as IBM, BT, and, most recently, MTN and he is currently the Group Chief Enterprise Officer at MTN.

Oliver Fortuin takes over from Byron Clatterbuck who has resigned due to personal reasons and will be ending his tenure with the company on March 31, 2021. 

Byron joined the ICT company in 2012 as its Chief Commercial Officer and became SEACOM Group CEO in February 2015.

“The SEACOM team has built an excellent data connectivity platform in the markets where we operate. We now hope to expand upon this, as well as to develop more industry-leading services that today’s corporate customers in Africa require”

Oliver Fortuin – Incoming CEO, SEACOM

“Mr Clatterbuck has been instrumental in shifting SEACOM from a subsea cable operator to becoming Africa’s leading Internet and data transmission provider – offering services to other service providers, direct to corporates, and, more recently, into the consumer market with the WonderNet brand. The shareholders and employees of SEACOM would like to thank Mr Clatterbuck for his valuable contributions over the last eight years.” SEACOM’s Chairperson, Pieter Uys, said.

SEACOM launched in July 2009 as a “wholesale”-only subsea cable operator that sold linear transmission capacity on its SEACOM Subsea Cable System for the first few years of its existence.

In 2015, SEACOM entered the direct to corporate market in South Africa, followed by similar launches in Kenya in 2016 and in Uganda in 2019.

While the company continues to be a significant player in the IPT and data transmission markets in the service provider segment in Africa, serving most hyper-scalers, cloud players, regional ISPs, and global telcos, its key growth focus is to expand its value proposition into a fully-fledged fibre-led Telecoms provider for enterprise and corporate segments.

“The SEACOM team has built an excellent data connectivity platform in the markets where we operate. We now hope to expand upon this, as well as to develop more industry-leading services that today’s corporate customers in Africa require. Our key focus will be to strengthen our customer base in the corporate segment by offering a wider range of services that provide greater value to our customers and can help SEACOM capture more share of wallet in this space,” Fortuin said on the company’s plans for the future.

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