For years State Electric Company (STELCO) has been an exclusive synonym to utility provision. Many would only attribute the company’s long running history only to the distribution of electricity across the Maldives.
Decades passed until another state company in the name of Fenaka Corporation came to inception with a similar vision. While the younger utility provider has gone ahead to make headlines for their various achievements and corporate expansion, STELCO had remained comparatively stifled and stagnant.
However, this is no longer the case and it is apparent with the forward thinking vision of the state-owned corporttion’s incumbent Managing Director Mr. Hassan Mughnee.
When Hassan Mughnee first took helm as the STELCO, he had at first not envisioned the potentiality of the corporation and neither did he observe any significant strides made by the company over the years.
The personnel of a corporation that is largely technical in nature, had no clear or unified vision of the future or STELCO’s overall objectives. In fact, as individual employees they had lacked their own ambitions to move forward through the corporation’s organizational hierarchy due to the relative non-existent nature of a career growth scope within the company.
To add to the woes of the new front-man of STELCO, Mr. Hassan Mughnee discovered that the company’s financials were derelict and needed some serious overhauling. He had compared the company’s then situation with the analogy of a rudderless ship navigating across uncharted waters.
However, this did to affect the resolve or Mr. Mughnee and neither did it hinder his efforts to push ahead with the growth and modernization of STELCO. In fact he made it his life’s mission to ensure that under his tutelage the company’s only direction will be up.
Mughnee recalls the lack of sophisticated policies in place when he first took chair as the Managing Director of STELCO, and he pointed out to the alarming lack of proper operational guidelines within the corporation; whether it was for intrinsic use or external applications. He even brought forth the commonly faced plight of consumers amid the more humid periods when electricity usage surges across households – which was never explained or answered thoroughly by the corporation.
Under Mughnee’s tactical leadership one of the foremost initiatives by STELCO was to launch an awareness campaign targeting the entire customer base of the corporation towards surge of electricity amid humid days and how to counter it. The now observable change across local households in electricity usage as well as the significant drop in complaints over the issue is a testament to Mughnee’s genius.
Speaking about his experiences and the first wave of challenges he faced upon taking charge, Mr. Mughnee stressed that the company lacked long-term policies for its growth and organizational objectives – which one of the major areas he attempted and successfully rectified over the new few years.
Compared to most of his predecessors, Mughnee is a visionary who aims to take STELCO to new innovative heights and he wanted to relinquish the identity of STELCO as only a utility provider – he wanted to foster the corporation into something more.
One such vision of Mughnee includes changing STELCO’s directives to achieve a status as leading professional engineering corporation apart from being a utility provider. The initiative would expand towards technological innovations and production of new services to cater to consumers.
As such STELCO is currently maneuvering itself to become its own manufacturer of power-out generators; which the corporation aims to achieve by producing skilled professionals in the field through academics and training.
Recently, STELCO made local headlines for its commitment towards assembling power generators for use. A wholly new segment under the corporation launched in order to cut down expenses incurred in procuring generators and its spare parts from foreign destinations.
The road did not end here for STELCO under Mughnee’s leadership since a few months later the corporation had announced its decision to manufacture electric-hybrid vehicles, which they aim to sell to consumers. In addition to expanding into hybrid vehicle manufacturing, STELCO will also become the premier solutions provider towards charging electric-vehicles across the country in the following two years period.
There is no denying that the company that was once solely known for its utility provision is currently venturing into braver territories under the helm of a visionary leader who aims to take STELCO to new heights.