Business News of Thursday, 10 February 2011

Source: Samuel Dowuona

Vodafone Ghana relocates headquarters to plush Manet building

Vodafone Ghana has virtually abandoned the headquarters building it inherited from Ghana Telecom for a plush nine-floor Manet building within the Airport City in Accra.
The building was acquired on lease from UT Bank for 10 years and Vodafone has turned it into a paradise, which Vodafone Ghana CEO, Kyle Whitehill said represents the vision Vodafone has for Ghana.
“The building we inherited from GT at Accra North does not represent the corporate image and visibility we envisage for Vodafone Ghana but we feel this new building does,” Whitehill said.
He said all of Vodafone’s activities have been relocated to the new building, which now houses 650 workers, but the technology block in the Accra-North building would be refurbished to continue housing the technical team.
Vodafone Ghana refurbished a new executive block at Accra-North under its first CEO, David Venn, but Mr. Whitehill said that newly refurbished executive block would remain redundant.
He noted that one of the reasons Vodafone needed to lift its corporate visibility was to provide an alternative to the runaway market leader, MTN.
“We feel MTN has far too much telecom market share and we believe our visibility is relevant to our ambition to be an alternative to MTN,” he said.
The building, which Mr. Whitehill said, did not cost Vodafone even one per cent of their revenue, was designed to reflect “Vodafone in Ghana, and Ghana in Vodafone.”
Apart from the ground floor, the other eight floors are decorated to reflect the cultures, sceneries and oral traditions of the all ten regions of Ghana.
Each floor is decorated with the artists’ impressions, photographs and proverbs from one region or the other.
The eight floor reflect the three northern regions, the seventh reflect Brong-Ahafo region, the sixth is Ashanti Region, the fifth is Eastern region, the fourth is Greater-Accra, the third is Volta, the second is Central and the first is Western region.
Corporate Communications Manager of Vodafone Ghana, Antoinette Atuah told journalists the ground floor is designed to receive visitors, and “after this trip and our executive launch, no visitors would be allowed to go beyond the ground floor.”

Samuel Dowuona
ENDS