(Ecofin Agency) - Telecom operator Liquid Telecom South Africa has successfully completed the restructuring plan it began last year. Under this plan, the company has improved its skills and its team will be rebranding by the end of the year to clearly reflect its new ambitions.

Liquid Telecom will become Liquid Intelligent Technologies by the end of the year, the new CEO Deon Geyser (pictured) revealed last week.

“If you look at the strategy that the Liquid Telecom team embarked on in the second half of last year – starting to reposition Liquid Telecoms South Africa to Liquid Intelligent Technologies that we will start to talk more about in the second quarter of this year – we have a large asset base of telecommunications infrastructure. We are reshaping the way we do business and we need to be more flexible as we are not a rigid machine just looking to put fiber in the ground,” Deon Geyser explained.

The strategy shift meets needs for new products on the telecom market, especially with the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak. “Our cloud services business is doing extremely well and that has been our fastest-growing product during the past financial year. What is great for me is that these new services that we talk about are not only talk, as we can see our customers reacting to that and taking services from us,” Deon Geyser said.

Liquid Telecom also sees this new orientation as an opportunity to make new revenues outside the traditional connectivity market. The Cloud segment alone is expected to be worth 23.6 billion rand ($1.6 billion) in the country by 2023, according to the SA Cloud Computing Overview and Market Sizing 2019 report published by the technology industry research and consulting firm BMIT.

Muriel Edjo