Around the block and back
Lowry, who has worked in the telecommunications industry since 1977, has replaced Maanda Manyatshe, who quit last year to concentrate on clearing his name after corruption allegations when he was still CEO of the Post Office.
Lowry recalls long sessions — “much of 1992” — trying to convince government that it should license two mobile operators, not one. He left SA shortly before MTN was launched commercially.
The first 14 years of Lowry’s working life were spent at the General Electric Co (GEC, now Marconi), a UK manufacturer, where he started as a production control engineer. He worked his way up and by age 29 was running an electronics factory employing 1500 people.
He was then moved into the commercial side of the business, running a GEC business in the northeast of England that made telephone handsets. It was at this time — in the mid-1980s — that Lowry first came across mobile technologies, specifically DECT (cordless telephony) and GSM (used by hundreds of mobile operators around the world). “It was clear to me that this was going to be big,” he says.
His opportunity came with C&W. The MTN investment was Lowry’s first assignment and he has since spent considerable time travelling the world representing C&W. After MTN, he spent 18 months in the Middle East before running a portfolio of C&W assets in Central and Eastern Europe. Then it was off to Australia, where he looked after the mobile arm of Optus, that country’s second network operator, before returning to the UK, where he took on a mergers & acquisitions role.
In 2001, Lowry quit C&W to join France Telecom, where he was brought in to solve a “difficult problem” the French operator had been experiencing with a joint venture in Germany. Two years later, he was given the task of running Orange — France Telecom’s mobile business — in Western Europe, a role he stayed in until joining MTN SA.
“The 2003-2007 journey in European mobile was interesting because it was around 2003 that penetration reached 90%-95% and the market moved from a focus on acquiring customers to retaining customers, attracting clients from other networks and offering additional services to existing customers. The model changed 100% in that period.”
Lowry, who is not keen to talk in detail yet about his plans for MTN SA, says he will be able to apply what he has learnt in Europe to the local market.
He says he is impressed with the quality and speed of cellular data services on offer in SA but is worried about not being able to keep up with demand. “We have a backlog on circuits which we’re waiting for [from Telkom] so that we can increase capacity and coverage.”
Lowry says he shares some of the concerns that Vodacom CEO Alan Knott Craig has voiced about capacity constraints.
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