Etisalat has approved the appointment of new CEOs for its cellular and landline arms in Pakistan, just moments ago. According to early information we have received through sources, Mr. Reiner Rathgeber has been named as CEO of Ufone while Dr. Daniel Ritz will be the new CEO of PTCL, starting today.
Reiner Rathgeber will replace Mr. Abdul Aziz as Ufone’s CEO, who was part of the team that launched Ufone back in 2001.
While playing a vital role in early success of Ufone which was only the second GSM operator in the country back then, Mr. Aziz was later appointed CEO of the company in December 2007. He currently holds the title for longest serving CEO of the company since inception.
Mr. Rainer Rathgeber (right) with Mr. Abdul Aziz during his visit at a Ufone Service Center in 2013
With over 20 million customers and a growing 3G network, Ufone has great potential for the near future. In fact, the company touched its highest daily revenues in last one year just today.
Mr. Abdul Aziz is a fellow member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Pakistan with almost 23 years of senior management experience in leading roles within finance & business with Price WaterHouse Coopers, Millicom International Cellular, Celltel, Warid & Ufone (Etisalat) spread over Asia, Europe and Africa.
Aziz has key expertise in green field operations in technology and mobile operations and the ability to turn them into successful operations.
New Ufone CEO, Mr Rainer, on the other hand, has 21 years of experience in the Telecommunications Industry across 4 continents. His most recent appointment was as Chief Commercial Officer at Etisalat Group. He was also overlooking Etisalat’s operations in Pakistan and has deep knowledge of Pakistani market and its dynamics.
Dr. Daniel Ritz, who was Chief Strategy Officer at Etisalat Group since February 2012, will replace Mr. Walid Irshaid, starting today.
Walid has been leading PTCL as company president and CEO since December 2007. He is credited to have played a key role in bringing the broadband revolution to Pakistan. Walid was the guy who pushed PTCL to start its DSL services in 2007 and stretched landline DSL coverage to several hundred cities with-in short span of time.
His company later introduced EVO and Nitro — wireless broadband services — that are billed as foundation for 3G/4G boom that Pakistan is currently seeing.
Daniel — who has taken charge as President and CEO of PTCL — was lately responsible for managing the Etisalat Group’s strategy, business development, expansion through mergers and acquisitions and strategic project management functions.
I hope new CEOs will bring new and innovative ideas with them that will ultimately benefit end users and I really hope Ufone to bring back its lost charm. Wishing good luck to PTCL and Ufone.
I must say that PTCL have improved their service quality. I have personally experienced it as I had ordered for wireless broad band three months back but eventually I have to e-mail Mr. Mian Omer Shah EVP customer services and he has resolved my issue within a day time. E-mailed personally and my broadband is working perfectly fine.
Service is: EVP doesn’t need to be contacted and you have working dsl connection in the week you ordered!
anyway congrats on your working dsl! and lets hope the new CEO bring about some positive changes and lets move beyond expensive adsl to vdsl or something better at economical prices.
The IT sector would really appreciate if the ptcl works on improving quality of service specially the ping times! 300ms is really slow :(
Astonished that author does not know, who is the CEO when PTCL was privatized. Walid Irshad is not the 1st CEO of PTCL after Etisalat took over.
Junaid Khan sb was briefly the CEO of PTCL. Ziada time Walid Irshaid nay hi guzara hay.
Junaid Khan was not the President and CRO after the privatization. He was the person who brought PTCL to the level where it could be privatized . Etisalat appointed Bamakharama as first CEO who lasted not long and Walid Irshaid came and true being the longest serving CEO.
exactly…aamir needs to update his records. running a telecom blog is not an easy task.
Ufone 3g ke speed aur package ache introduce karo.
Good change!! Infact it is bit late than expected and we hope that there will be more changes in the management teams because in both organizations, due to long stay of CEOs there is legacy that needs to go now to give way to new blood and fresh thinking. Good Luck to both new gentlemen’s and let us how things shape for both companies.
Change is always good if it is constructive. Ufone strategies will shift from accounting approach to commercial & technical evaluations.
The era of Abdul Aziz as ceo ufone was the most corrupt. Everyone in ufone earned a lot along with huawei who is their vendor, it was a pure corrupt corporate culture.
Abdul aziz and his crroupt team destroyed ufone
Thats y ufone is last rank
FBR should take action against mr abdul aziz and his crroupt team further mr abdul aziz badly damge the revenue of etisalat i dont know why etisalat is silent
Good decision by Etisalat, Kam az kam PTCL kai CEO to foran change kare… PTCL ko deewalia kardi enho ne…pathetic services of PTCL.. hope new CEOs will improve their services…
Yahan log comment aisy ker rahy hn.jesy Telecom expert hon.
Azadi izhaar-e-rai ka haq sb ko hai. Yahi jamhuriyat ka husn hai.
isi husn mien awaaam ko khoob lutaa ja raha hai
today will be a “YOUM E NIJAAT” for ufone as they will soon get rid of “thakkar” management team i hv seen all them very closely accounts nd technical is good but all others r just “faariq”
Meanwhile they are not giving all the bandwidth to charji users.
Hope this new CEO will do something Good in favor of customers.
can’t say it’s a bad idea considering Pakistani CEO have practically run Pakistani businesses into the ground. PTCL so far is a brown stain on the Pakistani consumer market.
Easiest way to describe how bad PTCL is would be my PTCL phone went dead and I decided I don’t want to pay 50 rupees (bribe) to the PTCL employed lineman to get it up and running again. It finally turned on 5 months after it went dead. This is how PTCL treats it’s customers of 30 years!
I even got internet connection from them once. They were all too eager to set up my payment account and handing me a modem the very next day. But when I asked the dumbass PTCL delivery boy “shouldn’t u check my phone connection to see if my internet signal is good. and install the modem?” he replied that “PTCL does not install internet modems. U should ask the local electrician to set it up!”. My immediate thought was this asshole is bullshitting with me just to weasel his way out of doing what he is paid to do. Being a computer expert myself I setup the modem and it ran….for 5 minutes before going dead. I complained about it to PTCL and they just connected me to some third party sales center who had no fucking clue what I was complaining about. The day after I went to see the person incharge of Internet department. I stated my case and he just called someone to look into it. That someone never came. I later learned that the incharge of Internet services I talked to was heading to Canada in a few weeks and couldn’t give a rats ass about any complaints.
After nothing happened for a week I went to see the incharge again but this time they told me no one can go to the talk to the Internet services incharge. I wouldn’t blame them. Any customer who saw how unprofessional lazy leeches are in the internet department would withdraw their subscription to PTCL internet immediately. After a month of running around trying to get my internet running (and yes paying the bill even when they refused to fix the service) I finally lost it. I went to the complaint department and asked them to if this is how they would treat their customers. Shocking to me was that I was not alone. Every day there was a long line of internet customers who came to the complaint department just to cancel their subscription. It wasn’t until I became hysterical at the complaint counter that he took initiative and send a guy to look into my complaint that very day. they figured out my local exchange box was a pile of trash and my copper wire connection was patched with so many other wires between my house and the exchange box that I was never going to get a clean signal. They made the line man fix the connection then told me to file a request for new connection with the phone department (after the marathon they made me run between their departments just to find out what was wrong with the internet). The internet was up…..for one day. I complained again and this time out of curiosity I asked the representative “If I ever had internet down during weekend How long will PTCL take to fix it?” maybe he took pity on me and answered honestly that “You won’t have internet until monday, because no one is at the local internet services office on weekends.” That was when I realized I would be better off on a private internet service rather then PTCL’s sorry excuse of a psuedo government internet service. I filed for cancellation the very next weekday.
But PTCL was not done with me yet! u see they refused to immediately remove internet charges from my phone bill until the next year. Something to do with their accounting process. So I ended up going to their complaint department for 6 months straight to manually remove the charges before paying the PTCL bill. I swore never to go back to PTCL for Internet EVER AGAIN! Those Assholes have no business providing even phone service to people….especially when they don’t respect their customers!
Who knows maybe the new CEO will fire a few (I hope all) of those lazy bastards and retrain those who treat their customers crudely!
Oh and a request to Propakistani. If possible you can show this post to the new CEO just to give him an understanding of what PTCL customers go through!