Mizutani has been serving as chief marketing officer of Colt from its London headquarters since October 2019.
Mizunati will stay working in Colt’s London office, but will be more closely involved in the Asian business going forward.
He will supervise Colt’s overall business operations and development in Japan and Asia.
Katsuya Oe will continue in his role of representative director in Japan and vice president, sales Asia, reporting to Mizutani.
The appointment follows Colt’s acquisition of Lumen EMEA in November 2023. Since then, more than 1,000 employees have joined the Colt team, including Annette Murphy.
Mizunati will report into Murphy, who served as president, EMEA & APAC for Lumen and is now chief commercial officer at Colt.
“As CMO, Mizunati has played a key role in driving Colt’s corporate growth and delivering on our global marketing strategy, getting closer to our customers with innovations such as AI,” Murphy said.
“Asia and Japan are critical to our growth and Mizunati’s deep understanding of the Japan
and Asia markets, customers and culture means he is ideally positioned for success within this important role,” Murphy said.
Following the acquisition, Colt is one of the largest business only telecommunication service provider globally, with around €2.3 billion in combined revenue.
Mizunati started his career in Asia as a technology support engineer and joined KVH, the predecessor to Colt, in October 2007.
From January 2015 to July 2016 he was based in Singapore, serving as a regional/product marketing manager, before relocating to the UK.
Mizunati said he was keen to achieve similar levels of growth at Colt APAC to compound annual growth rates (CAGR) outlined in a recent Gartner survey for corporate fixed data networks.
According to the survey CAGR between 2022-2027 is 2.4%, compared to 3.9% in Asia and 5.4% in Japan only, with a higher growth rate expected in APAC region.
“I would like to achieve similar growth at Colt APAC, together with our employees across the region,” Mizunati said.
