Reliance Communications names Vinod Sawhny as CEO

Reliance Communications Ltd, a fully integrated telecommunications services provider, has appointed Vinod Sawhny, former president of Bharti Retail, as its chief executive officer.

A MBA from Xavier School Of Management (Jamshedpur) and BE (Hons) in Mechanical Engineering from BITS Pilani, Sawhny was president at Bharti Retail and joint president at Bharti Airtel from 2002 to 2012. He was also a member of the Airtel management board during this period. Prior to that, he was managing director of Spice Telecommunications. Earlier, he was vice president at Godrej GE Appliances.

Started in 2002 and owned by Anil Ambani, Reliance Communications (formerly Reliance Infocomm) has established a pan-India, integrated (wireless and wireline), convergent (voice, data and video) digital network that is capable of supporting services spanning the entire communications value chain, covering over 24,000 towns and 600,000 villages. It owns and operates an IP-enabled connectivity infrastructure, comprising over 277,000 kilometres of fibre optic cable systems in India, the US, Europe, the Middle East and the Asia Pacific region.

Reliance Communications claims it has a customer base of over 110 million, including over 2.5 million individual overseas retail customers. The firm's corporate clientele includes over 39,000 Indian and multinational corporations including small and medium enterprises and over 830 global, regional and domestic carriers.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)