Telecom’s new persona: Spark

Mark Verbiest, chairman and managing director Simon Moutter, managing director, at the NZX building on the first day of trading as Spark New Zealand.

Starting today, Telecom New Zealand will be known as Spark New Zealand, and its IT services division Gen-i as Spark Digital.

The move marks the latest and biggest step in the company’s transformation over the past 18 months, reflecting huge industry changes and global shifts in communications technology, says managing director Simon Moutter.

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We now do much more than provide a copper line telephone service and we no longer own the fixed line network. We’re into a whole raft of new technologies. Simon Moutter, Spark NZ

“We now do much more than provide a copper line telephone service and we no longer own the fixed line network. We’re into a whole raft of new technologies…business cloud services, data centres, Internet TV, whatever new is around the corner. The Telecom brand simply didn’t reflect this new world,” Moutter says in a statement on the brand change for the 27-year-old company.

He says changes made in the year-and-a-half include the public wifi zones, new cloud services, partnership to offer free Spotify Premium and the Ultra Fibre launch.

“Success for any business means staying relevant to existing customers while also attracting new ones,” he states. “Spark will be a stimulus for new customers to take another look at what we have to offer, and we think they will be pleasantly surprised.”