Jon Fredrik Baksaas, President and CEO of Norway-based telecommunications giant Telenor Group, has demonstrated outstanding performance and direction in 2014. And unusually, Baksaas has been at the top for a long time by the standards of any industry, let alone one as casualty-ridden as telecoms. Nobody could say that he has not put his time at the helm to good use.
Appointed to the top job 12 years ago, this highly principled and self-effacing CEO has increased Telenor’s market capitalisation by $36bn during his incumbency, according to company reports. Now 60, Baksaas has ridden a telecommunications typhoon to take a once state-owned company into 27 markets around the world.
The Oslo-based group’s dominance in mobile, broadband and television in its own country could be expected, but the outward-looking Baksaas has grown Telenor through some daring moves into central and Eastern Europe, and into Asia.
For instance, Telenor has just launched operations in poverty stricken Myanmar, and confidently expects runaway growth as the country’s 53.25 million people increasingly come to embrace mobile and digital communications. Within the next five years, Telenor expects to be providing coverage for at least 90 percent of Myanmar’s population.
Unusually for a Scandinavian business, Telenor now derives just 24 percent of revenues from its home country, and 24 percent from Europe sitting on its doorstep. Most of the rest, with 43 percent, comes from far-flung Asia, a region to which Scandinavians have generally had little historical connection, particularly as far as business is concerned.
Testimony to the long-serving CEO’s vision is apparent in some of the latest quarterly figures from Asia. Largely on the back of signing up 3.4 million new mobile subscribers during the third quarter of 2014, principally in up and coming economies such as India, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Myanmar, Telenor posted its best-ever quarter in financial terms. Telenor’s EBITDAR margin of 37 percent would make most other telecoms CEOs green with envy. Looking ahead, revenues in 2014 should comfortably exceed last year’s $15.27bn.
A quiet leader who has no hesitation in pushing his executives, rather than himself, into the limelight, Baksaas now plans to bow out slowly following turning 60 in November. Indeed, he had planned to leave the company sooner, but ultimately his board wouldn’t let him go – as such, he has agreed to stay on through 2015. The board is still reluctant to see the back of him however, and so it has contracted him to serve as a ‘special advisor’ for a period of 12 months from January 2016 onwards.
Baksaas will leave behind a culture founded on execution. Telenor’s 33,000 employees are taught from day one to get the job done, albeit after thorough analysis. The group’s human resources division regularly runs courses on “the execution-oriented leader”, and Baksaas will undoubtedly be leaving the company as a man who practises what he preaches,.In his latest visionary move he has launched an online bank in Serbia, a location where nearly all banking is still done through branches. Nonetheless, in time this is likely to prove another well-executed move.