Profile: Solid innings for mobile visionary [VOD]
By Jeremy Scott-Joynt
26 April 1999
Chris Gent, Vodafone Group plc's chief executive, must be smiling right now. The mobile
network operator's results, due out next month, are likely to show the company going from
strength to strength. U.K. subscriber numbers are skyrocketing, with his company taking
the lion's share.
And recent events in the long-running quasi-religious row over 3G mobile standards - most
importantly the rapprochement between QualComm Inc. and Ericsson AB over intellectual
property rights - is making the merger Gent brokered with U.S. cdmaOne operator AirTouch
Communications Inc., announced in January, look ever more prescient.
Being ahead of the technological curve is nothing new for Vodafone, though.
The Newbury, England-based company has been quietly working with QualComm for three
years, learning how CDMA technology can work on top of GSM network infrastructure.
The relationship reflects the attitudes of Vodafone's chief executive, Chris Gent, very well -
even though it began a year before his ascension to the post in January 1997. Gent, says
one senior executive in another CDMA-based operator, has made sure that Vodafone "is
very hot on what's going on."
Gent joined Vodafone in 1985, when the company was known as Racal Telecom.
Prior to that he was director of network services for U.K. computer company ICL, and
managing director of a joint venture with Barclays Bank. Initially managing director of
Vodafone's U.K. business, he was a director by 1988.
From Vodafone's inception through to when Gent, who is now 50 and married with two
children, took over the top job, Vodafone saw itself as servicing the lucrative business
market, leaving new entrants such as One 2 One and Orange to prove you could make
money out of consumers as well. By mid-1997, Gent had radically shifted Vodafone's
approach: Tariffs were slashed, its distribution shifted to the high street, and its
promotional budget was boosted to £35 million.
Indirectly, this last factor has allowed Gent to indulge his main off-duty passion: cricket. He
was once a committed member of Hampshire Cricket Club, one of the top-flight sides in the
English game. That persuaded the English Cricket Board to turn to his company for
sponsorship - successfully, since Vodafone has been the English national team's main
sponsor since late 1997. "Obviously we had to make sure the numbers were right," one
ECB official commented. "But once it got to the board, with Gent there and [ECB chairman]
Lord MacLaurin as well, we were sure it would go through on the nod."
Vodafone officials agree. "I wouldn't say he was a cricket fanatic," says one. "But he's
pretty close."
Cricket, famously, is a game that goes on for days; a game of strategy and forward
planning, rather than just short-term tactics. Those who worked with Gent in the
pre-Vodafone days would say that was reflected in his thinking.
Tony Lewis, now executive director of the Computing Services and Software Association
but in charge of the association's membership when Gent was its vice president in the
1980s, recalls a company visit in 1982. "I clearly remember us talking over lunch. 'I'll tell you
what the future is,' he said. 'Cellular radio.' I was too embarrassed to ask what it was back
then. But he'd already seen it as a potent future business."
Gent's reputation within Vodafone as an approachable man, happy to stick his head round
colleagues' doors, is also backed up by Lewis. "He remembers people, and he's very, very
loyal," he said. "Almost 10 years after he left [the CSSA], I had a call from a company
which had dealings with Chris.
He'd told them they should get in touch with us. And three years ago, when our director
general retired, he managed to turn up for the party."
Less well known, perhaps, is Gent's politics. A life-long Conservative, he was national
chairman of the Young Conservatives from 1977 to 1979 - long before the youth group's
rowdy behavior and far-right attitudes led to its dissolution.
Gent is a long way from the rabid right that infected the Conservatives in the '80s; in fact,
rumor has it he managed to annoy Margaret Thatcher at a party conference in the late '70s.
"As far as she was concerned, he had leftist leanings," one party worker remembers with
amusement.
These days life seems relatively rosy for Gent, thanks to Vodafone's global renown, its
healthy growth projections and the AirTouch deal. If only England could contrive - by
some happy miracle - to win the Cricket World Cup, which starts in the United Kingdom in
May, that would be the icing on the cake.
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