Jassem Mohamed Alzaabi is Etisalat's new Chairman, takes over March 21

Dubai: Jassem Mohamed Alzaabi will be the new Chairman of Etisalat, starting March 21. He takes over from Obaid Humaid Al Tayer, who started his term in November 2019.

Alzaabi will be joined by Essa Abdulfattah Kazim Al Mulla, Hesham Abdulla Qassim Al Qassim and Mariam Saeed Ahmed Ghobash in the newly constituted Board of Directors.

The Emirates Investment Authority – the government shareholder in Etisalat Group - had nominated its representatives to occupy its seven seats on the Board.

Solid numbers

Etisalat is coming off from a strong year, in which it made gains on both revenues and on the bottomline. Group-wide revenues were Dh51.7 billion while consolidated net profit (after royalty payments) were Dh9 billion.

Its current CEO, Hatem Dowidar, had taken over in December 2020. "During these challenging times, we advanced our efforts to digitally transform our business both internally within the company and externally to all our customers, this led to increasing our subscriber base by 3.6 per cent reaching a total of 154 million subscribers," said Dowidar.

"This growth is central to our belief that the network and infrastructure has played a key role in empowering millions of customers during the pandemic. In the new normal, telecoms and digital technologies have become the anchor of our lives - be it remote working or virtual classrooms, our networks ensured that the world did not come to a standstill."