{"id":648900,"date":"2026-05-21T14:32:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-21T12:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=648900"},"modified":"2026-05-21T15:39:01","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T13:39:01","slug":"south-african-billionaire-telecoms-brothers-reveal-what-went-wrong-with-cell-c","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/telecoms\/648900-south-african-billionaire-telecoms-brothers-reveal-what-went-wrong-with-cell-c.html","title":{"rendered":"South African billionaire telecoms brothers reveal what went wrong with Cell C"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Blu Label co-CEOs Brett and Mark Levy believe the wrong leadership at Cell C was the fundamental reason the company ended up becoming an albatross around its biggest shareholder’s neck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a recent What’s Next with Aki Anastasiou<\/em> interview, the brothers spoke frankly about how Blu Label’s acquisition of a 45% stake in Cell C in 2017 has challenged their business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark said that Blu Label relied on advice from experts around the world who had evaluated the metrics and recommended the Cell C acquisition as a “clever” buy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark highlighted how he and his brother stood to lose the most if Cell C collapsed. “We’re the largest shareholders by far,” he said. “We couldn’t have done it for anything but the right reasons.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“We had the right horse. I think the rationale for buying the asset, the funding originally of the asset, everything was stacked up correctly.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark argued that things went awry with Blu Label’s backing of the “wrong jockeys”, suggesting that Cell C’s former leadership was at the core of the problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“We have to take responsibility because we chose a team,” he said. “The team’s implementation of the strategy failed, and because it failed, the wake it left behind, the ripple effect was disastrous.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brett also took responsibility for Cell C’s challenges. “The truth is, the market looks to Mark and I, and that’s fine. That’s the way it should be. We’re big boys, and we can take it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark said that one lesson from the experience was that execution was key: “If you don’t execute, you’re going to face several uphill battles, it’s almost like pushing water uphill.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Essential to turning the ship around in recent years was splitting its teams between those who would drive the core Blu Label business and those focused on Cell C.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frequent changes in leadership<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Cell C’s leadership issues predate Blu Label’s involvement with the company. It has had nine CEOs over its 25-year lifetime, contributing to its instability and frequent changes in strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Including its initial appointee, the position changed hands six times in the 16 years before Blu Label became its biggest shareholder, and three times thereafter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the time that Blu Label acquired Cell C, it had been under the leadership of Jos\u00e9 dos Santos for roughly four years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He took over from highly respected former Vodacom CEO Alan Knott-Craig, who had only led the company for about one and a half years before suffering a stroke in late 2013. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Douglas Craigie-Stevenson replaced Dos Santos after a first attempt at recapitalising the business failed to turn the company around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cell C’s then-chief financial officer, Zaf Mahomed, said that he and Stevenson walked into a mess of a company in 2019. “There was a lot of fixing to do,” Mahomed said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“As a mobile network operator, we were not profitable, we had stacks of debt on our balance sheet that needed addressing, and we had a business model which was not sustainable,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The company was forced into a second recapitalisation, which it concluded in 2022 with Cell C’s creditors taking a significant haircut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Realising that chasing after Vodacom and MTN in physical infrastructure would be a fruitless exercise, Cell C also decommissioned its own radio access network (RAN).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MTN now manages its virtual RAN, and Cell C customers benefit from a spectrum pooling agreement with the operator, as well as a roaming agreement with Vodacom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cell C continues to hold valuable mobile frequency spectrum. Brett explained that this was key to Cell C’s continued value for Blu Label. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“If you use spectrum correctly, the asset is worth a lot of money, because it’s something that cannot be replicated,” Brett said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brett said that Cell C’s roaming was different from other mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) because it had its own spectrum. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“We come and rent your base stations, but we bring our own asset, which is spectrum, and we let you use our spectrum.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blu Label’s Levy brothers believe the horse was never the problem, it was the jockeys they backed to ride it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341042,"featured_media":594210,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14,3],"tags":[102125,1017,4064,355,61535,19969],"class_list":["post-648900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-cellular","category-telecoms","tag-blu-label","tag-blue-label-telecoms","tag-brett-levy","tag-cell-c","tag-levy-brothers","tag-mark-levy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648900"}],"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\/341042"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=648900"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648900\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":649020,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648900\/revisions\/649020"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/594210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=648900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=648900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=648900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}