SEACOM, an African telecommunications and managed services provider, has announced that the company’s Group CEO, Oliver Fortuin, has resigned.
Fortuin will continue to serve in his position until June this year, during which time he will continue to support the SEACOM board and also participate in the process to announce his successor, which the company expects to conclude in the coming weeks.
Fortuin’s decision to leave SEACOM comes as a result of a decision to be closer to his adult children who have relocated overseas.
(TOP: Oliver Fortuin, SEACOM’s outgoing Group CEO. He’s set to leave the company as from June 2023).
“It’s been a privilege to lead SEACOM on this next stage of its development. SEACOM is blessed with great talent and a very experienced leadership team, who will provide both the continuity and expertise required to ensure we remain a leader on the continent as the company continues to transform and expand,” Fortuin said.
During Fortuin’s tenure, he drove the company’s ambitious five-year strategy to become a pan-African converged telecommunications organisation. Based on this, SEACOM has diversified its offerings in both the wholesale and enterprise segments, as well as entering new key markets broadening its geographic footprint. SEACOM has also completed several major acquisitions under Fortuin’s guidance. These include the acquisition of ICT service provider EOH Networking Solutions (EOH-NS) and Hymax, as well as the purchase of selected infrastructure assets in Kenya and Uganda.
Fortuin joined SEACOM as Group Group CEO in January 2021 from MTN where he was the Group Chief Enterprise Officer. He replaced Byron Clatterbuck. An IT industry veteran, Fortuin has worked for over two decades in a career spanning across South Africa and the rest of Africa, with major organisations including IBM, BT, and MTN.
“The last few years have been a period of change and growth for SEACOM. It has been thanks to effective leadership that we have weathered storms, made bold decisions, and redefined how we do business across the continent. We are grateful to Oliver for his commitment to our shared vision and wish him all the best,” said Pieter Uys, Chairman of the SEACOM Board.
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.
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