SEACOM’s 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 leave the company on March 31, 2021.
Clatterbuck will be replaced by Oliver Fortuin, who is currently the Group Chief Enterprise Officer at MTN.
Mr. Fortuin will be taking over the SEACOM Group CEO role on January 4, 2021. Mr 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.
In a statement, SEACOM’s Chairperson, Mr 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.”
Mr Clatterbuck said he was resigning for “personal reasons, and this has been planned for some time.”
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 telcos, its key growth focus is to expand its value proposition into a fully-fledged fibre-led Telecoms provider for enterprise and corporate segments.