Community Investment Ventures Holdings (CIVH) has announced the appointment of Raymond Ndlovu, as group CEO.
CIVH has appointed Ndlovu to drive and lead the company’s ambitious growth plans. He will be accountable to the company’s board of directors which is chaired by Remgro strategic investments executive and former Vodacom CEO, Pieter Uys.
CIVH is active in the telecommunications and information technology sectors. The group’s major operating companies are Dark Fibre Africa (DFA) and Vumatel, which construct and own fibre optic networks.
Ndlovu’s appointment at CIVH co-incides with the confirmation of several other senior appointments including Kobus Viljoen as chief financial officer, Andries Delport as chief technical officer and Neo Moshimane as chief corporate officer.
Before being appointed CEO, Ndlovu was an investment executive and management board member at Remgro since 2013. He has garnered extensive corporate and entrepreneurial experience in various fields in the financial services industry, including investment banking, asset management, and stockbroking, since 1998.
He has held senior management positions with several organisations, including Metropolitan Life, and Standard Chartered Merchant Bank. He co-founded and was CEO of an institutional stockbroking firm, Noah, for 10 years until July 2011.
His primary objective is to create a diversified wholesale, open-access ICT infrastructure business, to enhance the existing asset base.
DFA is a premium-quality, open-access fibre infrastructure and connectivity provider in southern Africa. It finances, builds, installs, manages and maintains a world-class fibre network to transmit metro and long-haul telecommunications traffic. It has deployed over 16 000km of ducting infrastructure in major South African metros, secondary cities and smaller towns. The network runs with uptime of 99,98%.
Vumatel pioneered fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) in South Africa and has since connected thousands of homes across Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban to world-class broadband internet. The company, which has a footprint, in excess of 600 000 homes, anticipates that there are at least a further 700 000 homes in emerging markets.
The open-access business models of both DFA and Vumatel have fostered the rapid growth and development of a competitive telecoms landscape in South Africa.
Ndlovu adds: “We initially started by investing in DFA and last year, we acquired Vumatel. When combined, these companies have become a significant business. Thus, it’s prudent to create capacity at the centre of the holding company – CIVH – to facilitate all the required strategic and operational targets.
“In order for that to happen CIVH needed someone to lead an executive team. The company needed people with a combination of business experience and leadership capabilities to head the business.”
According to Ndlovu, the idea behind the new executive team is to strengthen CIVH’s position in the telecommunications market and, down the line, “we are looking to create a diversified ICT infrastructure network business,” he concludes.