{"id":451,"date":"2007-06-29T07:58:00","date_gmt":"2007-06-29T05:58:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2015-07-07T08:07:44","modified_gmt":"2015-07-07T06:07:44","slug":"around-the-block-and-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/cellular\/451-around-the-block-and-back.html","title":{"rendered":"Around the block and back"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lowry<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

Lowry recalls long sessions \u2014 \u201cmuch of 1992\u201d \u2014 trying to convince government that it should license two mobile operators, not one. He left SA shortly before MTN was launched commercially.<\/p>\n

The first 14 years of Lowry\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 in the mid-1980s \u2014 that Lowry first came across mobile technologies, specifically DECT (cordless telephony) and GSM (used by hundreds of mobile operators around the world). \u201cIt was clear to me that this was going to be big,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

His opportunity came with C&W. The MTN investment was Lowry\u2019s first assignment and he has since spent considerable time travelling the world representing C&W. After\u00a0MTN<\/a>, 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\u2019s second network operator, before returning to the UK, where he took on a mergers & acquisitions role.<\/p>\n

In 2001, Lowry quit C&W to join France Telecom, where he was brought in to solve a \u201cdifficult problem\u201d the French operator had been experiencing with a joint venture in Germany. Two years later, he was given the task of running Orange \u2014 France Telecom\u2019s mobile business \u2014 in Western Europe, a role he stayed in until joining MTN SA.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cWe have a backlog on circuits which we\u2019re waiting for [from Telkom] so that we can increase capacity and coverage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lowry says he shares some of the concerns that Vodacom CEO Alan Knott Craig has voiced about capacity constraints.<\/p>\n

Comments<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MTN’s newly appointed SA MD, Tim Lowry, is no stranger to the SA market. As a representative of the UK’s Cable & Wireless (C&W), an early shareholder in MTN, the British-born Lowry was closely involved in the licensing of the cellphone company in the early 1990s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cellular"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/79"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=451"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":131460,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451\/revisions\/131460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}