TechLahore

Tore Johnsen, Telenor Pakistan's outgoing CEO

Telenor Pakistan’s CEO, Tore Johnsen, has been replaced by his Malaysian compadre, Jon Eddy Abdullah. Tore has been in charge since the 2004 launch of Telenor in the country. He has done nothing less than a fabulous job in ensuring market share, delivering a variety of innovative services and creating a pretty compelling brand identity in just 4 years. It wasn’t easy… Telenor’s launch co-incided with that of Warid Telecom, so there was always the issue of getting above the noise of a competitor’s promotions. Telenor has clearly outpaced Warid in acquiring new customers and stands today as the larger service.

We’ve covered a variety of Telenor products released during Tore’s tour of duty, including Telenor TV.

And I will tell you, while we admire Tore for competing hard in a growth market and fighting-off most of the competition, we do have plenty of gripes with Telenor. We think their service has deteriorated, the software client for their TV application is poor and their customer service is deteriorating by the day (see some of the posts under The Swine List page).

So, I guess Jon Eddy has a different set of challenges. He needs to consolidate the Telenor brand and effectively compete with gorilla, Mobilink, while keeping China Telecom (Zong) at bay. If the deterioration of service continues, Telenor might begin to see significant customer migration to other providers. Because the Pakistan mobile telco market is so heavily weighted toward pre-paid customers, customer turnover can be rapid.

We wish Tor the best as he jets off to Bangkok to take charge at Telenor Thailand as their new CEO, and we welcome the new CEO and hope Telenor improves and grows under his watch. He already has a lot going for him with a name as cool as Jon Eddy Abdullah

Share this: