Vodafone Ghana boss moves to Vodafone Qatar

Vodafone Ghana CEO, Kyle Whitehill

Vodafone Ghana CEO, Kyle Whitehill






Vodafone Ghana boss, Kyle Whitehill is moving to Qatar to be Chief Executive Officer of Vodafone Qatar, a report from Reuters said.

Adom Business broke the news of Whitehill’s movement out of Vodafone Ghana weeks ago. It was clear then he was going to another Vodafone subsidiary but it was not confirmed where exactly.

But the Reuters report said Vodafone Qatar announced on Tuesday Whitehill would take over from its CEO Richard Daly in June this year.

Daly returns to Britain due to some family issues, a statement from Vodafone Qatar reportedly said.

Head of Corporate Communications at Vodafone Ghana, Carmen Bruce-Annan told Adom Business Whitehill will be in Ghana till June/July before leaving finally.

Whitehill has been Vodafone Ghana CEO since 2010 and he is credited with turning the company around from an unprofitable, unproductive and chronically retrogressive entity into a productive and a promising one in terms of profits after tax.

In his three years as CEO of Vodafone Ghana, Kyle Whitehill has led the campaign to modernize the operations of the company.

He has been instrumental in reducing the huge expenditure by Vodafone Ghana on European expatriates, choosing instead to focus on recruiting local talent and also Ghanaians in the Diaspora.

Under Kyle Whitehill, Vodafone Ghana at one point was the biggest employer of “returnee” Ghanaians from the UK.

He would also be remembered for giving women the opportunity to rise to the top of the ladder at Vodafone. He kept a management with six women and three men, himself included.

Whitehill would be remembered for moving Vodafone into second place behind MTN, making it the second largest Telco by number of subscribers in Ghana.

He succeeded David Venn, and inherited a company with a subscriber base of about 2million and has grown it by more than 150% to over 5million.

Whitehill undertook a vigorous redundancy policy that saw the staff of Vodafone reducing from over 4,500 to 1,400, but the result has been the reverse of 26 years of non-profitability to a productive company.

It was under Whitehill that Vodafone deployed some of the world class technologies for both the mobile and fixed line operations, and a dynamic broadband wholesale business, Vodafone Wholesale.

Whitehill led a Vodafone that topped the broadband speeds charts in Ghana, and propelled Ghana to the top of the charts in Africa for two consecutive years.

Pundits have described Whitehill as an ‘aggressive goal getter’, but Whitehill said he is just passionate, and his passion yielded results that won Vodafone six laurels at last year’s Mobile World Ghana Telecom Awards, including the CEO of the Year and Telecoms Brand of the Year.

The company also won other prestigious awards both in Ghana and abroad, for both services and CSR (corporate social responsibility) under Whitehill.

But not everyone would remember Whitehill for the good reasons. Some Vodafone fixed broadband (fbb) customers, and some local internet service providers (ISPs) would remember him for their woes, particularly for playing referee and player, and for introducing a cap on fbb access.

It is still not clear when Whitehill will actually leave Ghana, but the question on people’s minds is whether Vodafone Ghana will choose a Ghanaian replacement, or another expatriate would come in.