Oliver Fortuin.

Internet and data transmission provider Seacom has announced that Byron Clatterbuck, who joined the ICT company in 2012 as its Chief Commercial Officer, and became Seacom Group CEO in February 2015, has resigned and will be ending his tenure with the company on 31 March 2021.

In a statement the company’s Chairperson, Pieter Uys, said “Mr Clatterbuck has been instrumental in shifting Seacom from a subsea cable operator to becoming Africa’s leading Internet and data transmission provider – offering services to other service providers, direct to corporates, and, more recently, into the consumer market with the WonderNet brand. The shareholders and employees of Seacom would like to thank Mr Clatterbuck for his valuable contributions over the last eight years.”

Byron Clatterbuck, CEO, Seacom.

Clatterbuck explained why now is the right time for him to hand over the reins. “I am making this decision for personal reasons, and this has been planned for some time. However, I did not want to make the final move until we had the right leader lined up to take over the leadership of Seacom as we push further into African markets and continue our growth in the enterprise segment. I am very pleased and confident to be handing over the leadership of Seacom to Oliver Fortuin, who will be ably supported by Seacom’s world-class executive team.”

Oliver Fortuin, who is currently the Group Chief Enterprise Officer at MTN, will be taking over the Seacom Group CEO role on 4 January 2021.

The company states that Fortuin has worked for over two decades in the ICT sector, across South Africa and the rest of Africa, with industry-leading organisations such as IBM, BT, and, most recently, MTN.

Seacom launched in July 2009 as a “wholesale”-only subsea cable operator that sold linear transmission capacity on its Seacom Subsea Cable System for the first few years of its existence.

In 2015, Seacom entered the direct to corporate market in South Africa, followed by similar launches in Kenya in 2016 and in Uganda in 2019.

While the company continues to be a significant player in the IPT and data transmission markets in the service provider segment in Africa, serving most hyper-scalers, cloud players, regional ISPs, and global telecommunication service providers, its key growth focus is to expand its value proposition into a fully-fledged fibre-led Telecoms provider for enterprise and corporate segments.

As to the company’s plans for the future, Fortuin said: “The Seacom team has built an excellent data connectivity platform in the markets where we operate. We now hope to expand upon this, as well as to develop more industry-leading services that today’s corporate customers in Africa require. Our key focus will be to strengthen our customer base in the corporate segment by offering a wider range of services that provide greater value to our customers, and can help Seacom capture more share of wallet in this space.”

Leadership changes

Seacom chief strategy officer Suveer Ramdhani.

In August Seacom announced that the resignation of its Chief Strategy Officer, Suveer Ramdhani.

The company said Ramdhani left the company to pursue other interests, and the strategy and development functions had been moved under Group CFO Richard Schumacher.

Seacom added that the resignation will not impact on any deals in the pipeline and said the company will “continue to look for opportunities to expand our business in Africa both organically as well as through M&A activity.”

According to a statement released by the company, Ramdhani had been with Seacom since its inception and was involved in its initial launch in 2009.