MTN SA chief financial officer Zunaid Bulbulia came to the telecommunications industry almost by accident.

It was December 1993 and Bulbulia, the son of a shoe salesman, was doing his articles for his CA degree at a Johannesburg accounting firm when he was asked by one of the firm’s senior partners to assist “this little company called MTN that had just started operations”.

“I didn’t really like this ‘articles’ thing and I jumped at the opportunity,” he says.

Bulbulia, who grew up helping his dad in his shoe store at Johannesburg’s Oriental Plaza, became effectively MTN’s second-ever employee after Karel Pienaar, who is now MD. “Karel was the pioneer who knocked on the door of the ANC to say we needed to compete with Telkom.”

The intervening 17 years have proved an exhilarating ride for Bulbulia, as MTN went from being a plucky start-up to a corporate leviathan.

“I was here before we even had any customers, when we just had a piece of paper saying we had a licence to operate,” he recalls. “It was a bit of a risk because you weren’t sure you were even going to get a pay cheque in those days.”

Born in 1969 in Canada – where his parents had lived for a few years after honeymooning there — Bulbulia, who some colleagues have referred to the Hashim Amla of SA telecoms because of the uncanny resemblance he has to the upper order batsman — returned to Johannesburg at a young age. He retains dual citizenship, but says he has never returned to Canada.

His dad’s shoe business, he says proudly, put him through school and university. “I grew up in the retail trade, selling wares like most Indian people,” he says.

Incidentally, the shoe store is still trading at the plaza: Bulbulia’s brother took over the business when his father passed away.

In his early days at MTN, Bulbulia was charged with assisting the marketing team to develop value propositions to encourage subscribers to choose its network over rival Vodacom’s. “Besides basic voice, we were doing directory enquiries and other products we wanted to use to differentiate ourselves from our only competitor at the time.”

In those early days, MTN was led by John Craggs, who had been deployed as project leader by then strategic shareholder Cable & Wireless. He would later be replaced by John Beck as CEO and later by Bob Chaphe from SBC (now AT&T), which acquired a stake in the business. “Chaphe came in with his American drawl and became the first real CEO we had,” Bulbulia says. “Beck was a big presence but he wasn’t around long enough [to leave a major mark].”

In 1995, Bulbulia moved into the billing part of MTN’s business, where he managed the service providers that interacted directly with consumers. Back then, the company had no direct contact with the end users of its services.

“We had 12 customers, we sent them a bill once a month, and if they didn’t pay we went after them with a baseball bat,” he jokes. “That was my first real commercial role in the business and I did that for 18-24 months.”

Then came the day that Bulbulia says “changed MTN’s history”.

In April 1996, Chaphe approached pay-TV operator MultiChoice to buy its cellular service provider, M-Tel. “Through the early years we came to the realisation that having only 12 customers was a big risk. Also, it was highly commercially inefficient, so the decision was made to buy M-Tel.”

Bulbulia and some of his colleagues were seconded by MTN finance chief Rob Nisbet to run M-Tel once the acquisition was concluded. What they found was a company in a bad state and in urgent need of a turnaround plan.

“M-Tel was my first real taste of what cellular is really about,” he says. “I ran call centres, credit vetting, warehouses and logistics. It was the best learning curve ever.”

The service provider business is now an integral part of MTN SA’s business.

After his time there, Bulbulia was made a number of offers to work in other countries where the rapidly growing MTN Group was expanding, but he declined to take these up for “family reasons”. Instead, he moved into the distribution side of the SA business, with the sales and logistics arms reporting into him.

“I learnt things there that will stand me in good stead for the rest of my life,” he says. “This business works, lives and dies by how you manage your distribution. He who distributes more effectively is the winner in this game.”

After five years in that role, Sifiso Dabengwa, then MTN’s group chief operating officer (and now its group CEO), offered Bulbulia the role he now occupies. He accepted it, but only if he could remain operationally involved in the business.

Among other things, he now looks after the wholesale business, which includes managing agreements with other operators, including the network roaming agreement with Telkom’s 8ta. “It’s the sale of our assets other than through our retail customers,” he explains, before adding with a grin: “I’m Indian. If I’m not doing some sales, I feel I’m not adding value.”

Given how MTN has progressed from a start-up, through years of strong growth and now into a maturing market, what keeps Bulbulia motivated? “We’re not growing at 50-60%/year anymore and trying to move a culture that is used to growing at that pace is a whole new challenge,” he says. “When you couple that with now trying to build a business model for data and converged technology, it’s a whole host of different challenges.”

But Bulbulia isn’t all business. At weekends, he is an avid road cyclist — he completed this year’s Momentum 94.7 Cycle Challenge in less than three hours — though he says he takes his life into his hands when training on Johannesburg’s roads. “Cycling 100km on a Saturday morning is quite hairy. The taxis are actually quite good but for other motorists a cyclist seems to be fair game.”

Married for 19 years and with five children — one is at university and the youngest has just started school — Bulbulia used to be a serious footballer, too, but injuries and four operations on his knee put paid to that. — Duncan McLeod, TechCentral