Route Mobile appoints Sharad Kumar Thukral as CEO, MENA region

Route Mobile Limited, a leading messaging & voice API company, today announced that Sharad Kumar Thukral has been appointed as CEO-MENA (Middle East & North Africa).

Based out of the Dubai (ME) office, Sharad will be responsible for building up the Middle East sales and operations team and expanding into Africa.

Sharad brings in more than 17 years of rich telecom & enterprise experience in managing the interaction of Business, Operations and Sales to Route Mobile.

Prior to joining Route Mobile Limited, Sharad was Vertical Head- Global Mobile Solutions (Messaging) at Bharti Airtel, where he had a total stint of almost 7 years.

In his earlier roles, he was Head-Pre Sales, Sify Technologies, Head-Business Solution Group (North Region), Reliance Communications and Senior Network Engineer, United Nations (Africa - DR Congo).

He has strong technical, business and commercial acumen with skills to drive new business & go-to-market into new regions.

Sharad holds a Bachelor in Electronics & Telecommunication (Mumbai University) and Post Graduate Certificate in Business Management (PGCBM) from XLRI, Jamshedpur.

Says Sharad Kumar Thukral, CEO-MENA, Route Mobile Limited, “Middle East & Africa regions are expected to witness significant growth in A2P SMS in the years to come. The use of Short Messaging Service (SMS) for transactional, advertising and other promotional activities in varied verticals has been gaining lot of interest. With the technological advances in M2M, lower infrastructure costs and excitement over the Internet of Things (IoT) has further augmented the role of A2P SMS as an efficient medium. There will be close to a billion cellular M2M connections worldwide by 2020, accompanied by an IoT ecosystem of billions of devices by that time. These connected things need to communicate, and messaging technologies, including SMS, will be a common medium which would proliferate SMS market.”

Says Rajdip Gupta, CEO & Co-Founder, Route Mobile Limited, “With the Cellent acquisition, our business has received a significant boost in the MENA region and now with a local presence we expect a growth of 20 to 25% in the enterprise segment.”