Batelco Group, which has suffered a sustained profit slump, said Sheikh Mohamed bin Isa al-Khalifa had resigned as chief executive and his predecessor would temporarily re-assume the helm.

Sheikh Mohamed became CEO of Batelco in October 2011, having previously served as deputy chairman. He replaced long-serving Peter Kaliaropoulos, who became group CEO for Strategic Assignments.

Batelco has now appointed Kaliaropoulos as chief operating officer and he, along with a three-person committee, will lead the telecom operator until a new CEO is hired, it said in a statement. The committee is comprised of three members of the company’s board.

Sheikh Mohamed has left the company with immediate effect. Batelco did not give a reason for his departure, but he was unable to halt a profit slump that the company largely blamed on tougher competition at home.

It competes with units of Zain and STC as well as about 10 Internet providers.

Batelco, majority government-owned, has reported declining profits in 11 of the past 12 quarters, with 2012 net profit down 22.2 per cent year-on-year.

Vodacom has announced that its full year revenues to end-March 2013 rose by 4.5 per cent to reach ZAR59.34 billion (US$6.3 billion), mainly driven by growth in Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique.

Excluding the sale of Gateway Carrier Services and foreign currency impact, revenue was up 5.3 per cent.

Continued demand for data services pushed data revenue up 22.2 per cent to ZAR10 billion, now contributing 16.8 per cent of Group service revenue up from 14 per cent a year ago.

Net profits rose by just under 30 per cent to ZAR13.2 billion, while Vodacom’s customer base rose to 51.7 million, from 47.8 million a year earlier.

The company, which is 65% owned by Vodafone ended the financial year with net debt of ZAR8 billion (US$850 million).

Looking ahead, the company said that over the medium-term (three years) it aims to deliver low single digit service revenue growth and mid to high single digit EBITDA growth.

Huawei has unveiled its latest series of Ascend smartphones across the Middle East as the company looks to deliver on its new “Make It Possible” consumer platform while advancing its position amongst the top five worldwide smartphone brands.

The Ascend P2—the world’s fastest 4G LTE smartphone—and the Ascend Mate—the world’s largest smartphone with a 6.1” screen—were originally previewed at this year’s Mobile World Congress and Consumer Electronics Show. In a similar style, the two devices were recently revealed in the Middle East and are set to be on retail shelves across the region by June.

“We first launched the product name ‘Ascend’ just over a year ago, and have since introduced a series of products offering the perfect combination of elegance and power,” said Jiao Jian, president of Huawei Device Middle East.”

The Ascend P2 is the world’s fastest 4G LTE smartphone featuring a 1.5 GHz quad-core processor and is compatible with LTE Category 4, providing an ultrafast web experience with download speeds of up to 150 Mbps. Running on the Android 4.1 operating system and with Huawei’s own Emotion 1.5 user interface, the smartphone is capable of downloading HD movies in minutes while loading online videos, web pages, songs or e-Books in just seconds.

The Ascend Mate boasts a screen-to-body ratio of 73 per cent – the highest in the industry – which maximises viewing pleasure for emails, documents, videos and games. The 6.1-inch high definition LCD screen has a resolution of 1280 x 720 for unsurpassed clarity and colour accuracy, with the ‘Magic Touch’ feature providing enhanced screen responsiveness.

Huawei has only recently pushed into the consumer electronics segment in the Middle East over the past two years with devices like its Ascend P1 S and the MediaPad 10 FHD tablet.

It’s most recent expansion within the Middle East market helped the company’s worldwide consumer business realise global sales revenue of US$7.7 billion last year—an increase of more than eight per cent year-on-year—shipping more than 127 million devices.

Today Huawei’s main ‘Ascend’ smartphone line spans four different product series including a Youth, Gold, Platinum, and Diamond class, which each offer a unique technology package to consumers at a variety of different price points.

Zimbabwe’s government is mulling a change to the telecom regulations that would require the mobile network operators to share their network infrastructure.

The permanent secretary in the ministry of transport and infrastructure development, Munesu Munodawafa told local media that the proposed legislation would help reduce costs and ultimately lead to low tariffs.

He suggested that there is duplication of investment in some areas, which in turn leaves other areas under invested.

"In future, we should have a policy that encourages sharing of networks and we believe that it would be cheaper in the long run for us to have shared services and base stations," Munodawafa said.

The biggest beneficiary of the change would be the struggling state-owned telco, NetOne, which would be able to share the infrastructure of the larger private network operators, Econet and Telecel.

For the first time in the Middle East, Huawei this week unveiled its SoftMobile solution, which is set to help build on-demand, orchestrated and ocean-like mobile broadband networks.

SoftMobile helps operators create commercial opportunities by opening up the way for mobile broadband success.

Total revenue from subscriptions can be increased via the expansion of the number of connections beyond what is possible with today’s smartphones, creating a huge opportunity for operators to become enablers of innovation by opening up network functionality to third parties developing applications to run across an expanding ecosystem.

Huawei believes that SoftMobile represents at least a US$2 trillion market opportunity for operators by 2020.

“What SoftMobile brings is the additional emphasis on software and the cloud,” Atif Jamil, senior Wireless Solutions manager for Huawei Middle East told Comm. “Through SoftMobile, 2013 is the year SingleRAN takes the step into a wider "single" structure via a common hardware platform supporting different standards. With SingleRAN as the common platform and through SoftMobile open APIs, applications are given on-demand access to network resources to enable the implementation of new business models.”

With the growth of heterogeneous networks, site complexity is increasing and the need for network orchestration that can manage coordination of a multi-band, multi-layer and multi-cell environment becomes of paramount importance. One of the primary applications of the SoftMobile approach is orchestrated resource utilisation. This helps operators coordinate resources along multiple network bands, modes, layers and cells to maximise the value of their network investments.

Huawei confirmed that SoftMobile is implementable for operators in the region now.