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Soumendra Sahu is set to take over as Airtel Uganda’s new Managing Director following Manoj Murali’s retirement at the end of this month.
Soumendra is a ‘Big Boy’ in the telecom business having spent a bigger part of his career at Bharti Airtel in Gujarat, India, where he has been serving as the Chief Executive Officer since 2020.
Before being appointed Chief Executive, he rose through the ranks from being Vice President of Marketing in 2015, Head of Sales of Operations in 2017 and Chief Operating Officer from 2017 to 2020.
Soumendra has over twenty years of experience in intensive sales and marketing roles in the telecom and paints industries.
He spent 16 years managing product and retailing of telecom services in various Indian geographies such as Karnataka, Maharashtra, Mumbai, Gujarat, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Bihar and Jharkhand.
According to his LinkedIn, he has specialties in Products- Acquisition, Products-Usage and Retention, Revenue Planning and Pricing, Products-Value Added Services, Brand Management, Research, Market Planning, Sales and Distribution in Telecom.
He also has exceptional data analysis and interpretation skills developed through training and exposure at work.
His strength lies in managing cross-functional teams set up to achieve specific objectives. He’s excellent at internal communication and inter-departmental coordination and skilled in planning and implementation of GTM to achieve objectives within time and budgets.
Other roles
He kicked off his career in 1998 at Asian Paints, an Indian multinational company working in various sales and marketing roles and was responsible for meeting sales targets, collection and managing the dealers of a given territory.
He also spent part of his career at Reliance Communications from 2005 to 2007 where he was involved in managing pre-paid activities for the Indian mobile network operator based in Mumbai.
Between 2007 and 2009, he worked with Bharti Airtel Limited and was involved in acquisitions, handled complete product portfolio for pre-paid and was responsible for customer and revenue addition.
Between 2012 and 2015, Sumendra worked as General Manager, Head of Marketing at Tata Docomo, an Indian mobile network operator, and was responsible for Overall Revenue and Relative Market Share of the circle.
In his role at Tata Docomo, he was involved in device strategies and implementing programs around these to add new customers into the base and grow the usage of existing base, among other roles such a Products-Acquisitions, Products-Usage & Retention, Revenue Planning & Pricing, Products-Value Added Services, Brand Management, Research & Market Planning.