Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin, who steered the cellphone operator in a sometimes tempestuous five-year pursuit of growth, will resign at the end of July, the company said today. He will be succeeded by Vittorio A Colao, his 46-year-old deputy chief executive, who said he would continue Sarin’s push to expand into Asia and Africa. Sarin came to Vodafone in July 2003, three years after the company acquired San Francisco-based wireless operator AirTouch Communications, where he had been president. The timing of the announcement surprised some analysts as Sarin had recently solidified his leadership after a rough start. “This is the right time to leave. We are now well-positioned strategically,” he said. Under Sarin, Vodafone nearly doubled the number of customers to 260 million from 133 million in March 2004, primarily by entering relatively untapped markets in India, Turkey and eastern Europe. Shortly after Sarin took over, British investors opposed his bid in 2004 to acquire AT&T Wireless, at the time the third-largest American carrier. The purchase would have made Vodafone, which owns 45 per cent of Verizon Wireless, the largest cellular operator in the US. Instead, AT&T Wireless was bought by Cingular, and the combined company is now the market leader in America. “Shareholders in the UK basically blocked the AT&T Wireless bid. That was certainly a setback and the low point for him over here,” said Mark Newman, an analyst in London at industry research firm Informa Telecoms & Media. “But ironically, the collapse of the AT&T bid proved to be a watershed for the company, and allowed Arun Sarin to really recover and put the company back on track again.” Sarin followed with two large acquisitions, both in merging markets: the $10.7 billion purchase in May 2007 of Hutchison Essar, India’s third-largest operator with 44 million customers, and the 2006 purchase of Telsim Mobil, the Turkish wireless operator, for $4.6 billion. Around the same time, growth in saturated European markets, which still make up about 70 per cent of sales, was slowing. Write-downs on acquisitions by Sarin’s predecessor Chris Gent began to hurt Vodafone’s performance and share price. For the fiscal year that ended in March 2006, Vodafone reported a £21.9 billion loss, described as the largest in European corporate history. Sarin trimmed Vodafone’s presence in Western European markets by selling operators in Sweden and Belgium, where penetration approaches 100 per cent, but added operations in relatively underdeveloped markets like Romania. Vodafone also sold its mobile business in another saturated market, Japan, where it had been losing market share to its larger competitors NTT DoCoMo and KDDI. The Indian Express
Last update : 28-05-2008 08:27
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