By Paul Sandle
LONDON (Reuters) -British fibre broadband network CityFibre’s founder Greg Mesch has stepped down as chief executive and has been succeeded by chief operating officer Simon Holden with immediate effect, the company said on Tuesday.
Mesch, who has led the company since it was founded in 2011, has been appointed vice chairman, it said.
Mesch said it was an obvious time to make the change given that he was 65 and had been relentlessly working on CityFibre for 15 years, culminating in signing its biggest customer, Sky last year.
“When I closed the Sky contract, it was kind of the end because it took me almost 12 years from the first meeting with Sky to get them over the line,” he told Reuters in an interview.
“We also did the financing. So when the financing was done we waited until after the summer holidays and decided to make the announcement.”
“It’s a very, very good succession plan. Simon has been in this company for six years,” he added.
CityFibre, which competes with the likes of BT and Virgin Media O2 in the UK, secured a $3 billion financing in July to fund its network and acquire smaller rivals.
The company, backed by Antin Infrastructure Partners and Goldman Sachs, in February reported its first full year of profit, and aims to expand its wholesale network to more than 8 million premises.
It has built Britain’s third-largest broadband network, selling fibre connections via retail providers including Vodafone, TalkTalk and Sky, its newest customer.
Under Mesch’s leadership, CityFibre was key in persuading regulator Ofcom to open up the fibre market to competition, spurring investment in the sector that has totalled between 20 billion and 30 billion pounds ($40.5 billion).
Mesch said he told Ofcom’s former chief executive Sharon White that he could make BT invest in fibre better as a competitor than she could as a regulator.
“I was relentless in saying if you unleash competition you drive a better outcome,” he said. “And we have.”
Mesch said his successor, who was senior at Goldman Sachs, was the ideal leader as the market increasingly consolidates.
“For us to consolidate the industry, we’re going to have to tap the capital markets again and again and again,” he said.
Mesch, who plans to move back to his native United States where his children are now based, said he would continue to support CityFibre’s long-term direction as vice chairman.
($1 = 0.7402 pounds)
(Reporting by Raechel Thankam Job in Bengaluru and Paul Sandle in London; Editing by Nivedita Bhattacharjee, Sonia Cheema and Tomasz Janowski)
