Aniqa Afzal Sandhu, currently the Chief Digital Officer at Jazz, has been appointed the VP, Global Operations, at VEON, we have confirmed with sources.
This marks the second time that a Pakistani has been appointed at a high-level position at VEON within a short span of time. Mrs. Aniqa’s appointment follows that of Mr. Aamir Ibrahim, the CEO of Jazz, who was just recently made the Head of Emerging Markets at VEON (Algeria, Pakistan and Bangladesh).
According to available details, Aniqa will be responsible for marketing the VEON platform and help them in their goals to achieve large-scale user engagement.
As part of her new position, she will be based in London and reporting to Christopher Schlaeffer, VEON’s Chief Digital Officer and a member of the Group Executive Committee of the company.
For the time being, she will be retaining her position at Jazz as Chief Digital Officer until a successor is appointed in her place.
ALSO READ
CEO JAZZ, Aamir Ibrahim Appointed Head of Emerging Markets, VEON Group
Aniqa has been with Jazz for over 12 years. She has largely been credited with pulling off multiple, successful initiatives there as well as developing new business streams for the company.
Her key achievements include setting up of Mobilink Microfinance Bank. She also helped Jazz attain market leadership in mobile wallets with JazzCash.
She has also played a vital role in setting up National Incubation Center. She launched the company’s flagship acceleration program “Jazz Xlr8” and assisted with the recent launch of VEON in Pakistan as well.
Under Aniqa’s leadership, VEON achieved the 1 million app download mark in just 19 days of its official launch in Pakistan.
Captain of sinking ship? VEON is made by Russians and is an Russian company. I do not know if it is a news that a another Pakistani is working for some foreign company. I do not think Europeans and Americans will allow a Russian company to spy on their citizens. India has already many such services and VimpleCom do not even has a presence there. China case is similar to India, already has such services and no presence of VimpleCom. Coming to other markets, operators in every country will resist another operator from another country doing marketing in their country. Everybody will launch their own version of same thing even local market operators. Probably it will be confined to Russia and Pakistan and few poor eastern European countries. I do not see any glorious future for VEON whatever it is. It is already tried and failed strategy for an operator to launch a service for global markets let alone in local market where they have licence. Operator business is platform, it is stupid to enter into application or service domain. Top services of 5G, Industrial Robotics, VR, Drones and Autonomous/Connected car. Now is there any operator in the world in position to become player in any of these domains? With 5G, network will become more complicated so it will be wise to focus on making and manage network better. It is un realistic to think Pakistanis will have the wisdom to do the right thing, so most likely, the push to focus on ur network will come from abroad.
nothing could describe it better. Thank you Bilal Ahmad
Looks like Aamir and Jazz are looking in a fool’s paradise thinking that Veon will takeover a free and feature rich social app like whatsapp :(
It is a Russian initiative not Jazz. Operators in general but Paki operators in particular are big fools. Using a standard European cellular technology which means they have “nothing” to compete on other than which people they use in Ads, how much they discount on sms and how many Ads they do per month. People like Aamir (background in car sales) has no clue about where tech is going. Regarding communication part of VEON, this is tech category where timing matters. Yahoo messenger for internet messaging, Skype for VOIP and WhatsApp for mobile calls/messages were all successful due to timing. Once it is done, others can launch easily but never will be successful. This is main reason it was stupid idea to launch VEON in presence of whatsapp and skype. Operators working like startup? 98% startups fail “totally”. Operators just cannot afford that. I do not know if Pakistani operators have money to buy 5G as it means big network upgrades.