Tee hee hee

You mean the guy who transformed tiny Racal Vodafone into the only global pure mobile giant - while everybody else fell by the wayside or had to sleep with the enemy (fixed comms). And he did it profitably. The supreme deal maker without whom the shares would be worth no more than Racal's!

So a person who builds an empire is not best suited to running one - especially as the market matured (saturated). Different skills. Sarin had a rocky ride transforming a sometimes incoherent global empire into an operationally profit motivated group.

Someone who can turn a £35bn revenue stream into a £10bn profit (really?) can't be doing too much wrong except, possibly, beating the regulators into allowing such a rip off of our mobile phone charges.

OK so they had a builder and a transformer. Now they probably want to stabalise the business with an administrator. Mobile is getting boring. The new Chris Gents & Hans Snooks will be building new industries elsewhere. But where?

Indeed, Gent and subsequently Sarin have served the shareholders reasonably well. There were a couple of hiccups on the way (anyone remember the idiot who tried to sell Nokia's candy bar phones to the Japanese) but the play on the biggest open emerging market (I consider China closed in this respect) is probably a good one.