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Mr. Roepers has experience across multiple disciplines, including international business development, marketing & sales, as well as financial and corporate management. His primary expertise is in offshore growth strategy development and related project management, with specific industry knowledge in the Information, Communications and Technology (ICT) realms. He has led venture development and corporate expansion initiatives in The Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
A seasoned executive with a penchant for evolving overseas ventures, Mr. Roepers has a proven ability to gain and command respect from customers, investors, colleagues and global teams, to establish clear direction and to resolve the inevitable conflicts organizations experience as they grow, and that larger entities face during changing market conditions. He demonstrated his skills in structuring and negotiating joint ventures in the ICT, Enterprise Network Solutions, Internet and International Banking and Investments spaces. He operates in 5+ languages and has a thorough understanding of the risks involved with, and sensitivity to, cultural differences in developing business in foreign markets. He is experienced with regulatory processes and has led partnership structuring and other collaborative development with NGOs, SOEs and government agencies.
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Highlights
from his career include:
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In recent years, Roepers has been primarily involved in the creation of technology investment vehicles concentrating on emerging markets of the Middle East and Latin America, and as Board member of growing communications and technology companies. Specifically, he has been instrumental in the creation of a Luxembourg-registered and Abu Dhabi headquartered investment firm focused on growth-stage Information Technology, CleanTech, and Communications ventures seeking to access the Gulf Region and broader MENA markets.
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Effective mid-2004, as Chief Executive Officer of Bolivia’s second-largest nationwide communications and Internet services provider, his CMP-assembled project team reorganized, re-launched and restructured this full-service operator. Ahead of plan, AXS Bolivia produced its first EBITDA positive semester in company history in 2005, and registered record sales growth. Later that year, AXS was awarded the Surprise Enterprise of the Year trophy following an independent nationwide survey. Upon acquiring majority ownership in early-2008, a US investment firm named Roepers to AXS Bolivia’s Board of Directors. Following comprehensive balance sheet clean-up, the outlook for 2009 is for the operator to double its pre-restructuring revenue, and further increase operational profitability.
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Recruited in 2000 by UBS Capital for one of its portfolio entities, as Senior Vice President for Corporate Development for IFX Networks, a 10-nation Latin American Internet Services Provider. There, he developed a new Network Services strategy, created several international network alliances, and developed a new revenue stream from enterprise and carrier accounts. Lockheed Martin Corporation recruited him, in 1998, as Vice President for Strategy, Alliances & Ventures for its telecommunications business. Reporting to the group president, he led the development of the long-range plans surrounding the $2 billion acquisition of Comsat Corporation; he was later involved in the operational integration of both telecom entities.
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From 1993 until 1998, Roepers was Director for Offshore Telecom Operations for Latin America at Sprint International (later Global One, and today a part of France Telecom’s Orange). During his years in various management positions, he was responsible, as well, for Business Development activities in the Middle East, Africa, Russia, India and Latin America. For most of the 1980s, he worked as Investment and Treasury Officer in the Investments and Financial Markets Division of the Inter-American Development Bank.
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Roepers received a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from Nyenrode University in The Netherlands, and holds a Master of Science Degree of Georgetown University’s Graduate School of the Foreign Service in Washington. He is either fluent or comfortably proficient in French, German, Spanish & Dutch, and has a basic understanding of Italian, Portuguese & Farsi.
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