Telecom Lead Asia: Telenor’s India subsidiary Uninor has appointed Rajeev Sethi as chief marketing officer.
Rajeev’s responsibilities will include marketing, new product development, customer lifecycle management, sales and distribution for Uninor’s operations pan-India.
Before elevation, Rajeev Sethi has led Uninor operations in UP East for the past two and a half years.
Uninor will announce the new circle business head for UP East shortly
The appointment is significant as Uninor, after the March 2013 spectrum auction, will be looking for further enhancing its mobile market share in India. Also, due to spectrum auction and related controversies, Uninor mobile customers faced uncertainties.
Uninor says Rajeev’s appointment is expected to assist the mobile firm to bring in new strategies.
In fact, Rajeev was instrumental in increasing Uninor’s subscriber market share in UP East — to #4 based on subscriber market share from # 10 position three years ago. Uninor has the fifth largest position on revenues in UP East
UP East became the first Uninor circle to reach the EBITDA break-even target within 34 months of start of operations — fastest break-even by any mobile operator in any circle in India.
Sigve Brekke, managing director of Uninor, says Uninor is impressed with the results from the UP East circle and he hopes that Rajeev will bring winning strategies to the benefit of Uninor’s marketing operations.
Meanwhile, Sharad Mehrotra, currently Uninor’s chief sales officer will move to Bangkok and take up a larger role as the head of Distribution 2.0 project at Telenor Asia.
This significant appointment is in-line with the Telenor’s Industrial Development Program where key talent from operating companies will take up senior positions at the Group level to implement successful models in other country operations.
Uninor’s mass market distribution approach, partnership model with the trade and cluster approach towards conducting and measuring its business has received attention from across the Telenor Group.
In the new role, Sharad will look to implement these strategies in other Asian operations
