Tigo Ghana gets new boss

Tigo Ghana has been assigned a new General Manager (GM) by the Millicom Group and he is due to arrive in Ghana in about a month, Adom News sources have revealed.

The new GM, Adil El Youssefi, who has been General Manager of Millicom Chad since January last year, would be replacing Carlos Caceres, currently studying at Harvard College in the United States.

Youssefi joined the Millicom Group in December 2008 as Head of Value Added Service for Tigo Sri Lanka until November 2009, then moved to Chad as Deputy General Manager/Chief Operating Officer until January last year when he became the substantive General Manager.

He is leaving Tigo Chad as the number mobile operator in that country, with some 1.9 million subscribers as at the end of the first quarter of 2012.

But prior to Millicom, he had experience in the electronics industry working as Project/Product Manager for Royal Philips Electronics in France for over five years, before moving into the telecoms industry as Business and Technology Manager for British Telecom (BT) from October 2007 to November 2008.

Highly-placed sources at Tigo Ghana said Carlos Caceres’ would be relocating to the United States, adding that he would return to Ghana briefly next week, but that would be just to ‘pack and leave finally’.

It is still not exactly clear why Caceres is leaving Tigo Ghana, and what exactly he is moving on to in the US.

Carlos Caceres’ time at Tigo spanned over a period of about six years, from December 2006 to May, 2012.

He joined Tigo Paraguay in December 2006 as the Marketing Manager until January 2008; he then moved to Tigo Senegal as Marketing and Sales Director and later as Chief Marketing Officer until December 2009.

Caceres came to Tigo Ghana in January 2010 as Chief Operating Officer until March 2011 when he became the General Manager of Tigo Ghana.

It was under his watch the Tigo introduced the award winning Tigo Insurance Scheme and other value added services such as Tigo Cash, Tigo SOS, Tigo Adamfo, Tigo Facebook Phone, and the all time lowest on-net tariff of 3Gp among other innovations.

But Caceres also came to Tigo Ghana when the company was the second largest mobile operator by subscribers, and he is leaving it as the third largest operator, which has been losing subscribers consistently for several months now.

Recently, Tigo has been insisting that in spite of what the NCA’s quarterly reports said about its market share, it was confident that based on its own method of measuring mobile penetration in Ghana, it was still the second largest operator by subscribers in Ghana.

But that argument came under some criticism from the regulator, causing Tigo Ghana to shift the poles and report in its first quarter results for 2012 that its market position in Ghana could be second or third.

Whether Tigo is number two or number three, it is an undeniable fact that the company has been losing subscribers on a regular basis for the past several months, under the Caceres’ watch, and that means the new GM’s job is clearly cut out for him; to stop the decline and ensure increase.

Until the new MD comes, however, Tigo Ghana Chief Technical Officer, Obafemi Banigbe has been acting as General Manager for the Ghana operations, and he has just introduced three time-based data packages promising unlimited access to the internet.

Under Caceres, Tigo sponsored at least about 10 Ghanaian staff for Masters and Executive Masters programmes at Harvard College.

One of those was Consumer and Brands Manager for Tigo Ghana, Rosy Fynn, who has recently been appointed to the Africa Regional office of the company in the same capacity.

In her new capacity, Rosy would sit in the Millicom Group’s head office in Luxemburg, and have oversight responsibility for all six operations of Tigo in Africa.

She also leaves Ghana by July/August this year.

Samuel Nii Narku Dowuona