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Hamburger to go, says Telecom of latest XT departure

Thursday 25th March 2010

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Telecom’s so-called Mr XT, Paul Hamburger, who led the retail mobile operation for the country’s largest phone company, will leave the company in July.  

Hamburger becomes the second Telecom executive to leave after the XT debacle – chief transformational officer Frank Mount was the first – when the phone company was forced to pay $15 million in compensation to customers over a string of outages on its new mobile network.

Telecom head of retail Alan Gourdie said Hamburger decided to leave at the end of his current contract with the “launch and consolidation” of the network completed.  

“Paul Hamburger led Telecom’s retail mobile operation, responsible for such areas as product management, plans and pricing, handsets and supply chain, retail promotion and sales, as well as roaming partnerships and services,” Gourdie said. “Paul’s responsibilities did not include the building or management of the XT network infrastructure.” 

Telecom has been flailing on several fronts this year, with the XT outages forcing a downgrade of its forecast, while government regulation over the company’s obligation to non-commercially viable customers prompted a further cut to its outlook.

The shares gained 0.5% to $2.14 on the NZX today, and have sunk 14% this year.  

Chief executive Paul Reynolds laid much of the blame of the network’s failure at the feet of its architect, Alcatel Lucent, whose New Zealand country manager Steve Lowe resigned last month. Alcatel made the matter a top priority, bringing its global CEO and executive team into the fold to address the failures.  

 

 

 

Businesswire.co.nz



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