KTHL appoints new acting bosses for Telikom, bmobile

By CLARISSA MOI
KUMUL Telikom Holdings Ltd (KTHL) has appointed a new acting chief executive officer for its subsidiaries Telikom PNG and bmobile PNG and the Solomon Islands in an effort to progress its reform activities.
Acting chairman Reuben Kautu told The National that the appointment was done to provide continuity to the business as the terms of previous acting CEOs could not be extended.
He added that the recruitment process of the appointment of permanent CEOs had been put on hold until the current business was stabilised and merged into one single telecommunication business.
Kautu confirmed that Amos Tepi, former head of commercial for Telikom, was now the acting CEO and Anthony Pakakota, former head of network was now the acting CEO for bmobile PNG&SI.
“The board has total confidence in both men in continuing the merger and reform activities until full the merger is complete,” he said.
“This is yet another initiative by the KTHL board to provide opportunity for our own Papua New Guineans to take charge and prove themselves in those leadership capacities.”
Kautu told The National last month that the merger of bmobile and Telikom into a single retail operator began in 2018 and was expected to be completed by December or early next year.
He said that the National Executive Council (NEC) approved the merger as part of the KTHL reform agenda, however, legal, corporate governance, technical and commercial areas were yet to be completed.
“There are also a number of dependencies that need to be overcome before the actual company merges into a single entity, namely around legal and corporate governance, but several areas around the technical and commercial front have now been progressed and are subject to certain approvals.
“Hence, if everything goes as well as planned, we are expecting the technical and commercial merger to be completed by December.”
Kautu said that merging the two entities would reposition PNG DataCo as the wholesale carrier so KTH would have a wholesale business of which would eventually own all the network infrastructure and a retail company (merged Telikom and bmobile) with a mobile, fixed line and internet service provider businesses.
“The reforms undertaken will take us into the NetCo model that has been pushed at the moment as a condition of funding but at KTH we are focused on stabilising our entities and merging them to reposition into profitability enabling us to compete at the retail level before the end outcome of the reforms towards a NetCo model starts to kick in,” he said.