Farhad Khan to lead Enterprise Business division at MTN Group

Farhad Khan

Khan will head up the newly created portfolio, reporting into the group chief commercial officer, Christian de Faria. The appointment of an internal candidate to such a critical function speaks to the richness of MTN's leadership pipeline, which is underpinned by a deliberate talent investment strategy to address current and future needs of the MTN business.

Khan's appointment is integral to the group's plans to source incremental revenue from Information and Communications Technology (ICT) business services into the future.

"MTN has rolled out a number of initiatives in the last 18 months, in line with our ICT strategy. However, we have identified that we can achieve more through improved coordination. As a result, we believe that our Enterprise and ICT focus as a group would be enhanced by a central execution function," says Christian de Faria, group chief commercial officer at MTN Group.

An enterprise segment focus

In line with this focus, some of the structural changes introduced include an Enterprise segment focus with stand-alone profit and loss, and targets on new ICT revenue streams. The Enterprise segment will drive the organisation-wide ambition, capture economies of scale and maximise cross-country revenue opportunities. It will also create and align the enterprise teams across all operations to ensure that the focus placed on Enterprise is consistent and efficient.

In the new role, Khan will be responsible for the implementation of an Enterprise strategy and structure across all MTN operations. He is also tasked with the responsibility of creating and implementing a global account management framework between the group and its respective operations.

Khan is not new to the ICT and Enterprise Segment environment. He joined MTN in 2003 as general manager for the Business segment in the MTN SA Marketing department. In this role, he oversaw the successful launch of Blackberry in South Africa, as well as the creation of the partner environment for data and connectivity. In 2005, he was part of the core team deployed to Iran, tasked with setting up operations in his role as executive for Marketing and Customer Relations.

In 2008, when MTN Group acquired the Verizon Africa operations, Farhad led the integration of Verizon into MTN SA operations, overseeing aspects such as ISP, HR, processes, technology and culture.

Before joining MTN, he held senior management roles at Accenture, Nokia and Telkom SA.