Proximus Global appointed Ericsson veteran Seckin Arikan as its new CEO.

Arikan replaces interim chief Mark Reid, Proximus Group’s CFO who filled in after Guillaume Boutin left the Belgian operator in spring to join Vodafone as CEO of its investment and strategy unit.

Coming over from Ericsson subsidiary Vonage, Arikan served as the cloud communication vendor’s head of business unit API for more than a year. Prior to Vonage, the exec spent more than 24 years at Ericsson, a career which was capped off with more than five years as EVP and head of its T-Mobile US customer unit, a stint which crossed over with Ericsson's acquisition of Vonage in 2022.

Arikan would join Vonage in summer 2023 as go-to-market head for its Global Network Platform, before becoming EVP, head of CPaaS (communications platform-as-a-service) and Network API sales a year later.

The new CEO joins Proximus Global after considerable fallout from the Vonage acquisition, with Ericsson taking a large write-down on its $6.2 billion investment due to what some analysts saw as a lack of obvious synergies with 5G connectivity.

While admitting to a bad decision, Ericsson CEO Börje Ekholm pleaded patience last year to see if the company could create “a separate new market for network APIs.” Such APIs are claimed by some as a possible gateway to the next wave of digital transformation posed by generative AI, private 5G, and real-time analytics.

Past and present

Arikan’s Ericsson career started off with project, supply chain, and commercial management roles, before progressing to key account manager positions across West Africa. Arikan also served as head of commercial management for almost five years.

His hiring at Proximus Global comes after its inception at the start of the year, consolidating various ventures from Proximus Group: connectivity/carrier services via BICS, Route Mobile’s CPaaS offering, and digital identity and verification through Telesign.

Proximus was recently contracted to deliver advanced networking capabilities for migration of the NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA) to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

The company sold its data centers last October to local operator Datacenter United (DC United). As part of the deal, which closed in the first quarter of 2025, DC United took over four facilities in a deal valued at approximately $138.5 million.