Paratus Group celebrated its 20th anniversary on 23rd February 2023. On that day two decades ago, its founders, Barney Harmse (now Group Executive Chairman), Rolf Mendelsohn (Group CTO), Schalk Erasmus (Group CEO), Gert Duvenhage (Group COO), Martin Böse (Group SysAdmin) and Miles O. (Group Marketing Executive), embarked on a journey to establish Africa’s quality network.
With humble beginnings, they started the company in a small and unimpressive house in Luanda, Angola, and now we have grown to become a major telco player with an impressive footprint in Africa, a workforce of almost 600 people and a multi-million dollar valuation.
Statement by Paratus
Paratus has achieved this success by owning our own infrastructure, choosing and empowering the right champions, and serving customers across the countries’ divides with a seamless quality network service. Today, we are proud to provide services in more than 35 African countries, and we have points of presence (PoPs) throughout Africa, and also the USA, UK, and Europe. Furthermore, we are the appointed partner to land the Equiano subsea cable in Namibia, and we have already built five of our own carrier-neutral Data Center facilities in three African countries.
We started from zero, but were committed to delivering Africa’s quality network. We have achieved that and more. Despite our success, we remain humble, yet confident about the future that we work toward every day. I firmly believe that we are just getting started, and the next 20 years will be exponentially better. We look forward to our future expansion and to transforming Africa through exceptional digital infrastructure and customer service. I am enormously proud of how far we have come and of all the wonderful Paratus people who have been true to our mission and made our Group such a force for connectivity in Africa.
Barney Harmse, Group Executive Chairman, Paratus
One thing that is unique to our business is that all the original founders are still with the business today and we’re still going strong. We are probably the only pan-African network that can claim this unbelievable achievement.
