End of an era as Michael Joseph calls it a day at Safaricom

By Morris Aron

It is now official, Michael Joseph — the brain behind East Africa’s most profitable company — will be retiring as the chief executive of mobile telecom giant, Safaricom.

Robert Collymore, who until now has been sitting on Safaricom board as a non-executive director, will replace Mr Joseph.

Mr Collymore, the new Safaricom chief executive, has an experience in the telecoms industry that span over 30 years in various roles.

He has once served the Global Purchasing Director, Vodafone and Consumer Marketing Director for Asia based in Japan.

IN AND OUT: Robert Collymore (left), takes the reins of power at the most profitable company in East and Central Africa, replacing long serving Safaricom CEO Michael Joseph. [PHOTO: FILE/STANDARD]

He has spent the last four years in South Africa where he served as the Governance Director for Africa, Vodacom. Prior to joining Vodafone, Mr Collymore worked with the retail giant Dixons Stores Group, the cellular operator O2 and BT in the UK.

Joseph, who officially leaves office on November 1, now moves to a yet-to-be-specified advisory role for two years while maintaining his board membership in the company.

On the cards

"The chairman and board of Safaricom has announced the retirement of Michael Joseph as chief executive with effect from November 1," read a statement announcing his retirement.

Plans of Mr Joseph’s retirement started two years ago but have been building up in the last couple of months following a curious pronouncement he made recently about being ‘keen on retiring before the end of the year.’

MJ, as he is popularly known, transformed Safaricom from a once rusty and moribund department within the defunct Kenya Posts and Telecommunications Corporation (KP&TC) into an internationally-acclaimed telecommunication giant revered worldwide for innovation. Over the recent months, the company has made news for raking in billions of shillings as profits.

Mr Joseph, who holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cape Town, had a first paid job of fixing manual telephone headsets in South Africa. He arrived in the country in 2000 with a team of five people from Vodafone Plc to carry out the task of establishing a mobile phone services company.

His arrival followed Vodafone Group Plc — injection of $20 million into the then outdated and congested analogue network owned by KP&TC after the Government sought a strategic partner to take over the system that was on the brink of collapse.

Under Mr Joseph’s watch, Safaricom grew to become the most profitable company in East Africa with 16 million subscribers.

Safaricom also boasts of pioneering the mobile money transfer service M-Pesa, whose runaway success is a world first.

The tech-supported mode of payment has revolutionised how the rural unbanked transact their businesses from the comfort of their handsets. M-Pesa has won international awards and is currently being replicated in other parts of the world after radically transforming the financial services scene and how the poor access money in Kenya. Mr Joseph also played a key role in seeing the success of an IPO that saw the shareholding of the company transferred to over 800,000 shareholders.