Financial Times

Hans W - model for Lanka's young corporate sector

By Akhry Ameer
Taking charge of an underdog in its industry at the age of 29 years and having transformed a digital mobile communications company as an undisputed market leader earned Dr. Hans Wijayasuriya recognition as the Chartered Institute Management Accountants (CIMA) Business Leader of the Year 2004, at the recent CIMA-Janashakthi Pinnacle Awards.

Dr. Wijayasuriya, Executive Director/Chief Executive officer of Dialog GSM, jointly won the award with Dian Gomes, group director of the Sara Lee Courtaulds/MAS Holdings joint venture cluster at MAS Holdings.

Having successfully turned the 7-year old company to its present status, Dr. Wijayasuriya is modest and rates the award as one for the company.

A doctoral graduate in the field of Digital Mobile Communications from University of Bristol, UK in 1994, he returned to Sri Lanka and joined Dialog GSMs engineering division. “Good engineers are business minded, so their products are sellable. I always had that in me, when the opportunity came to look at this from different perspective I took the challenge,” he says of his appointment as Chief Executive Officer and the credit of being the first local to head the multinational, a fledgling in the industry in 1997.

“Life skills of an engineer are good to run a business. It gives you most logical thinking processes needed for business,” said, Dr. Wijayasuriya justifying the shift from engineering to management. Since then there has been no turning back. From the driving seat he has visibly grown the mobile operator to not only to take the lead but also successfully convert a capital-intensive infrastructure into a commodity. In addition, the Dialog GSM broke the price barriers in mobile telecommunication and made the leading edge technologies of the world in mobile communication accessible to an ordinary customer.

In an interview with The Sunday Times FT, he said this innovation from a larger perspective; to look after the company s people and product, while ensuring delivery of the key deliverable of any CEO, and also making sure of financial returns to shareholders is what made him worthy of the award of a business leader.

Having reached this position, Dr. Wijayasuriya’s vision for Dialog GSM is very bullish. He is of the view the current 11% mobile penetration is still relatively low and Dialog intends to play a major role in pushing this figure past 20% and make its product more affordable and accessible offering the best in technology. The company recently pioneered the usage of the supermarket channel to sell a mobile connection and opened a FUTURE CENTRE with 3G (3 rd Generation) technology for users to try out.

The award augurs well for the company, he says. It has created a sense of commitment to remain as leaders in the eyes of the customer and credibility of business leadership among its entire workforce.

Personally, the award is a justification to the stamp of faith of Dialog’s principals, Telekom Malaysia, who made a bold step of handing the reins to a 29-year old local. “In that sense, there is much more to deliver-a long way to go,” he adds as one of the youngest CEO’s of a multinational company in Sri Lanka today.

Dr. Wijayasuriya has also published widely on the subject of digital mobile communications in many international publications and presented at many international forums.

He is also the past Chairman of GSM Asia Pacific and has served in many honorary positions locally such as the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Modern Technology and Director of the Information and Communications Technology Agency (ICTA).

The Pinnacle Awards was organized by the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) Sri Lanka and the Janashakthi Insurance Company Ltd. to foster high standards in business excellence and leadership in Sri Lanka.

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