Member States of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) elected Mr Houlin Zhao of China as Secretary-General of ITU for a four-year term. The election took place in Busan, South Korea, during the 19^th ITU Plenipotentiary Conference. Mr. Zhao was elected with the votes of 152 countries present.

 

The Bulgarian national delegation headed by Mr. Veselin Bozhkov, PhD, Chairman of CRC, supported the candidature of Mr. Zhao.

 

Mr. Zhao was born in 1950. He graduated from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications in China in 1975. Mr. Zhao received a Master degree of Science in telematics from the University of Essex, United Kingdom. From 1999 to 2006, he held the position of Director of the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB). In 2006 he was elected Deputy Secretary-General of ITU at the Plenipotentiary Conference in Antalya and was re-elected for this position for a consecutive second term at the 2010 Guadalajara Plenipotentiary Conference.

 

On 2 October 2014, on the eve of the 19^th ITU Plenipotentiary Conference, Mr. Zhao made a visit to Sofia at the invitation of Mr. Veselin Bozhkov.

 

The visit was an expression of the excellent relations, the active collaboration and the constructive dialogue between CRC and ITU – the largest international organization in the field of telecommunications, having a statute of a United Nations specialized agency.