Vodafone Idea appoints Manoj Murali as chief operating officer

MUMBAI: Telecom’s tough markets have a new operator at the controls. Vodafone Idea Ltd (Vi) has appointed Manoj Murali as its chief operating officer (COO), effective 19 October 2026, bringing an executive with more than 25 years of experience across telecom and mobility businesses into a key operational role.

Murali arrives from Ola Electric, where he has served as chief business officer since July 2026. Before that, from December 2024 to June 2026, he was regional business head for the west at Jio. There he led the end-to-end P&L and commercial strategy for the company’s Western Region, spanning Mumbai, Maharashtra, Goa, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. His remit covered revenue growth, market share expansion and subscriber acquisition across a multi-state corridor, and go-to-market strategy across B2C and B2B segments in a hyper-competitive 5G landscape. He led large cross-functional teams across sales, distribution, customer experience and network operations, translating national strategy into regional execution with accountability for full business outcomes.

The bulk of his career was spent at Bharti Airtel. He began in sales and marketing and customer service roles across circles in South India, and later moved up as vice-president for operations in the Kerala circle. In December 2011 he moved to Hyderabad as chief operating officer and senior vice-president of the Andhra Pradesh circle, a post he held until April 2014, where he helped stabilise and grow one of the country’s largest telecom markets by revenue. He then served as chief executive officer for Kerala and Tamil Nadu, running the P&L of a dual-circle business across markets with a population of more than 80 million.

Africa came next. As managing director of Airtel Uganda from October 2020 to December 2024, Murali ran the country-level P&L for one of East Africa’s leading telecom operators. He scaled commercial operations, built partner ecosystems and led organisational transformation after the pandemic. He delivered subscriber growth and improvement in average revenue per user (ARPU) in a high-growth, high-complexity emerging market.

In his own words, Murali builds telecom businesses that move markets. His edge, he says, is that he understands telecom markets at the ground level and the boardroom level at the same time. He has launched products, rebuilt distribution networks, led turnarounds and managed regulatory complexity across two continents. He describes himself as operating at the intersection of commercial strategy, operational discipline and people leadership, and says the teams he builds win and the markets he enters grow.

The analysis is simple. A chief operating officer at a telecom operator needs to be a numbers person and a street fighter, and Murali has played both roles at scale. He has run circles, a country and a multi-state region, in a business where distribution, customer experience and network operations decide who wins. His time across Airtel, Jio and Ola Electric gives Vi a leader who knows how its rivals compete and how consumer-facing businesses are run. For a company in a fiercely contested 5G market, that breadth is a useful asset.