Frank Ip will be senior vice president of global business and partnerships, with the task of strengthening the company’s global growth.
“CITIC Telecom CPC’s reach is truly global, which makes us an extremely resourceful and powerful partner,” said Ip. “I’m looking forward to working with the team as we move into the next period of significant growth.”
Until last month Ip (pictured in Huawei days) was based in the San Francisco area, where he worked in Huawei’s CTO office – an increasingly precarious position since the US government added Huawei to its entity list of banned companies.
At Huawei he specialised in security: in 2017 he was the company’s director of product management network security services.
Before that he was VP of marketing and business development at Black Lotus, a security specialist that was acquired by Level 3 Communications in 2015. Level 3 has since become part of CenturyLink.
US-educated Ip, with degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Clara University, has joined CITIC Telecom CPC “to proactively address growing customer and market demand driven by the company’s international business vision and strategy”, said the Chinese company.
CITIC Telecom CPC is owned by state-controlled CITIC, formerly the China International Trust Investment Corporation. Its strategy is to build global links – initially for Chinese companies but increasingly for world companies wanting access to China – along the country’s Digital Silk Road project.
“I’m extremely excited to be joining CITIC Telecom CPC at a point in time when the company is very successfully growing, while the industry and market are also expanding with new business models and partnership opportunities,” Ip said.
Stephen Ho, CEO of CITIC Telecom CPC, said: “His extensive experience, proven track record in growing businesses and building high performance sales and marketing teams across various industry sectors, deep knowledge of the ICT market and network security industry, will be critical to CITIC Telecom CPC as we continue to expand on a global basis.”
He added: “We are confident Frank will help foster a new positive dynamic to our business and help open doors and enhance collaborations with some of the world’s largest carrier partners and IT vendors.”
In 2016 CITIC Telecom CPC acquired Linx Telecommunications, which includes its 470km optic-fibre network in the Baltic Sea. A year ago it launched a software defined wide area network (SD-WAN) service across its European network and at the end of last year Ho told Capacity that the company plans to expand its cloud services from Asia into Europe.
