Houlin Zhao is the new ITU secretary general.
Houlin will replace present ITU secretary general Hamadoun I Toure.
Houlin Zhao is from China and is the current ITU deputy secretary general.
Zhao will take office on 1 January 2015 for a term of four years, with the possibility of re-election for one additional four-year term.
The election took place in Busan, Republic of Korea, during the Plenary session of the PP-14 conference, said ITU in a statement issued on Thursday.
Zhao won the position with 152 votes, with 156 countries present and voting. He contested the position unopposed.
Zhao, a telecoms engineer with over 30 years’ experience in the international environment, serves as ITU deputy secretary general (DSG), a post he has held since January 2007 after being elected by ITU’s 2006 Plenipotentiary Conference in Antalya, Turkey.
In his two terms as DSG, Zhao pioneered new initiatives to expand ITU membership to the global academic community, and implemented efficiency improvements in human resources management and financial administration.
Achievements during Toure’s 8 years
Since the beginning of 2007, when Toure took office as secretary general, the number of mobile cellular subscriptions globally has more than doubled, from 2.7 billion to 6.9 billion.
In developing telecom markets, mobile subscriptions grew from 1.6 billion to 5.4 billion in eight years, ITU said.
Over the past eight years, the number of Internet users grew by 1.7 billion – rising from 1.2 billion at the beginning of 2007 to 2.9 billion at the end of 2014.
During the same period, developing world Internet users have grown almost four-fold, from 500 million to 1.9 billion.
By the end of 2014 there will be around 2.3 billion active mobile broadband subscriptions – with more than half of them in the developing world.
editor@telecomlead.com