Dar Es Salaam — Zain Tanzania has been voted "2009 Most Respected Company" in the country by East Africa's top CEOs.

The mobile phone giant was unveiled as the winner at a gala dinner held at a Nairobi hotel on Saturday. Vodacom and Tanzania Breweries Limited (TBL) were named as second and third most respected companies in the country respectively.

Safaricom emerged the region's overall winner for the third year running, beating Kenya Airways (the 2005 and 2006 overall winner) to second place while pan-African mobile phone operator, MTN, came in third.

Mobile operators were the winners of the top awards in all the five categories on offer -one overall and four country awards in the 10th anniversary of the survey organised by auditing firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and undertaken by an independent research firm, Synovate (formerly Steadman Group) with the Nation Media Group (NMG) being a media partner.

In Uganda, MTN beat Serena Hotel to the second place followed by Bidco during the awards, which were first introduced into East Africa in 2000 by PWC to celebrate business excellence across the region.

In Rwanda, which held its inaugural country awards last year, MTN emerged the Most Respected Company with another brewer, Bralirwa, coming in second and Serena third.

"It's a sign that our peers respect us for what we do...they respect us for the creativity and innovativeness as witnessed in the type of products that we offer," Mr Khaled Muhtadi, the Zain Tanzania managing director told The Citizen by phone yesterday.

Maintaining its second position in the market, Zain recorded some 330,583 new subscribers between April, May and June this year to bring the total number of the company's subscribers (until the end of the first half) to 4,435,462, according to Tanzania Communication Regulatory Authority (TCRA) reports.

The company is only second after Vodacom which boasts about six million subscribers in a market of about 14 million subscribers and seven competitors.

Money transfer services According to Mr Muhtadi, among the services that may have helped the company win the respect of a total of 180 chief executives from four EAC member countries of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda is the mobile company's money transfer service.

In partnership with CitiBank and Standard Chartered Bank, the company announced recently that its customers, registered with the Zap service, could swiftly and securely receive money from any bank account around the world and easily send money to any bank in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

"This is one of the best innovations... it allows our customers to receive funds from anywhere in the world directly to their mobile handsets as well as send funds directly to their Bank accounts... I think it is one of our benchmarks for respect," said Mr Muhtadi.

The company is also expanding its coverage in the Lake Zone while its 'Build Our Nation' campaign, under which it offers books and other learning materials to schools, is one of the best corporate social responsibilities that a company can make.

New sector Mr Charles Muchene, the survey director told the Daily Nation that performance of mobile operators is based on the fact they operate in a new sector that has a lot of competition.

"It is because they are in a new sector with many opportunities amidst fierce competition," Mr Charles Muchene, who doubles as partner at PWC Kenya, told the Daily Nation in an interview on Saturday night at a Nairobi hotel, during the awards gala dinner.

When contacted for a comment yesterday, Vodacom's director of corporate communications Mwavita Makamba could not comment because she was in a meeting. "I am in a meeting now and I cannot take your call," she told The Citizen through a text message.

MTN Uganda CEO Themba Khumalo, concurred: "We operate in a very competitive sector, which means we have to be very innovative to keep pace with the changes in the market and an ever-increasingly demanding customer."

Quality products and services Tanzania Breweries Limited (TBL) corporate affairs and communications manager, Mr Maneno Mbegu said the company was happy to be recognised, noting however that they would wish they had a better rank.

"We are happy to be recognised.... it shows the survey is an independent one and is not based on anyone's influence," he told The Citizen by telephone yesterday.

According to Mr Muchene, for the first time, the quality of products and services featured as the key driver of respect among the surveyed CEOs followed by expansion into new markets and market leadership.

Recently, TBL's flagship brands, Kilimanjaro and Safari lagers, won gold medals at the 'Monde Selection 2009,' an annual event in Brussels, Belgium for tasting alcohol, food, tobacco, perfumes and cosmetics.

"We recently won gold medals - an indication that our products are of supreme quality," he said. TBL has been recognised as one of Tanzania's most respected companies since the East Africa's Most Respected Company Surveys were launched nine years ago.

The company is currently constructing a new brewing plant in Mbeya that will give it some 0.5 million hectolitres, to bring its total production capacity to 3.5 million hectolitres.

The Sh88billion facility, being constructed in Mbeya gives the company a strategic location and synergies to penetrate neighbouring countries of Malawi, Zambia and Democratic Republic of Congo.

This year's survey was conducted against the backdrop of the global financial and economic crisis and the CEOs were therefore required to comment on how various companies implored new strategies to overcome challenges brought by the crises.

"The winning companies are generally those that have not just survived the economic downturn, but managed to thrive," Mr Muchene told Daily Nation in reference to the ongoing global economic crisis, "We are seeing some light at the end of the tunnel for the broader business community."

The recession, which was regarded to be the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, hurt both advanced and poor economies sparing almost no sector.

In this view, organizers decided to theme this year's event as 'Rethinking and Reshaping the New Normal'.

Many large corporations in the US, Europe and many other parts of the world collapsed while in East Africa the severe consequences to the corporate sector included layoffs and declines in profits.

CEOs interviewed in the survey were required to determine the values and attributes that are important to them when defining the term 'respect', the PwC country senior partner in Tanzania, Mr Leonard said while briefing journalists about the survey in Dar es Salaam last month.

"So in short, it will be neither PwC nor NMG that determines which company deserves respect but rather, it is the region's CEOs that do so," he said.

Findings from the business issues section of this year's survey will also be used to form part of a global study of chief executives conducted by PwC to be launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2010.

The overall Most Respected Company in the region last year was Kenya's telecom giant Safaricom, which won for the second year in a row, Kenya Airways and Zain.

In Uganda, Uganda's MTN was the most respected company, followed by Mukwano Group and Zain. In Rwanda, which participated for the first time, MTN Rwanda was declared most respected, Bralilwa Breweries was second and Serena Hotels third.

During the past surveys, CEOs attributed respect to a company's corporate social responsibility policy, provision of quality products/services, a strong leadership, consistent high levels of growth and having a broad regional network among others.