SYDNEY: Optus’ CEO will need more time to turn around the embattled telecom carrier, the boss of its parent Singapore Telecommunications, who is in Australia to confront the fallout from outages of its emergency call services, said on Tuesday (Sep 30).
The back-to-back outages, which happened less than two weeks apart, follow a string of other high-profile failures at Optus including a nationwide outage and data breach, which have intensified scrutiny of the carrier’s governance and management.
Singtel CEO Yuen Kuan Moon, who was summoned from Singapore to meet with Australian authorities, said it would take time for Optus CEO Stephen Rue to transform the No 2 Australian telecoms firm.
“We brought in Stephen 11 months ago to transform Optus, to really address the issues that we had since 2022-23,” Yuen told reporters in Sydney after a meeting with Communications Minister Annika Wells.
“It is very early days. It takes time to transform a company. Stephen (Rue) has identified, and I believe so in the initial investigation of the 18th September incident, that it is due to a people issue, and it takes time to transform and change the people. He is here to provide the solution.”
Apologising for the Sep 18 network outage, Yuen said: “I’m here to support the Optus board and management to ensure that the independent investigation is conducted thoroughly and to make sure that future recurrence of this will not happen.”
Singtel is a unit of Singapore state investment firm Temasek Holdings.
