Are legacy businesses a dead weight on telcos?

RECENT executive appointments at telcos StarHub and M1 have raised the level of chatter about the industry's so-called "pivot to enterprise".

Manjot Singh Mann, who succeeds Karen Kooi as chief executive of M1 in three weeks' time, hails from a cloud software platform firm. Under Ms Kooi, the telco went "from a pure mobile communications player to a full-service provider", in the words of M1 chairman Danny Teoh.

Over at StarHub, an aggressive restructuring plan, unveiled last month by new CEO Peter Kaliaropoulos, involves more investment and hiring in areas such as cyber security and enterprise-oriented info-communications technology (ICT) solutions.