Vocus Group gets new CEO as Kevin Russell retires
Vocus Group has set its sights on picking up customers in rural and regional communities as the telco’s newly anointed chief executive gets ready to lead a five-year $1 billion plan to upgrade and expand its infrastructure.
Ellie Sweeney, currently the chief operating officer of the telco which owns retail brands Dodo and iPrimus, has been officially appointed as Vocus’ new chief executive. She will replace industry veteran Kevin Russell, who will step down on March 1 after a five-year tenure at Vocus and more than 30 years in the telecommunications sector.
Sweeney, who has worked at Vocus since 2019, becomes the latest to join the roster of female executives running major local telcos, including Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady and Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin. She has previously held senior roles at Telstra and World Directories in Europe.
Vocus chair Penny Bingham-Hall said Sweeney had proven credentials and thanked Russell for his contribution to the company. “To have an internal successor as CEO speaks volumes about Vocus’ shared sense of purpose and unity of culture,” Bingham-Hall said.
Sweeney’s appointment comes as Vocus, owned by Macquarie Asset Management and Aware Super, commences a five-year $1 billion investment program, which involves a boost to its security capabilities, an overhaul of its fibre infrastructure and an expansion of Vocus’ Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite network.
She told this masthead there was an opportunity to “shut down” the digital divide between regional and metropolitan areas.
“The one [policy area] that’s interesting for me is really regional connectivity for Australia…making sure that whether you’re a consumer, in hospitals, in education, in defence, in oil and gas resources…that those regional areas have a level of activity that we would expect,” Sweeney said.
Vocus this week bought Challenge Networks, a deal which will allow it to increase share of the local private mobile networks market, which is valuable to miners and others working in remote locations that need internet.
The telco also provides ground stations to Elon Musk’s Starlink, which is fast becoming a solution to poor internet connectivity in regional areas.
“I think our participation in Starlink and going early to market as a partner in terms of resale is a great opportunity for us to really help shut down or to close some of that digital divide,” Sweeney said.
The fourth-ranked telco provider was last year mulling whether an IPO of its retail brands, Dodo and iPrimus, was viable. Russell told staff in December those plans were on hold due to improvements in the financial performance of both brands.
Sweeney said both the Dodo and iPrimus brands retained significant value in the market.
“We see it as a strategic asset,” Sweeney said. “Our time horizon on that is to revisit that in two years time.”
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Source: Thanks smh.com