Business Coursework

Business Coursework

Right Phone wrong Connection?

When you thought of a mobile phone they wanted you to think of the bright red Vodafone logo. On their way they also happened upon the term "Vodafone Experience", effectively Vodafone wanted their customers to live, sleep and breath the Vodafone Experience. There simply would be no other mobile network that could offer you the warm fuzzes like Vodafone was going to do. Vodafone wanted to help design the phones, run the network and deliver you content on your phone through a walled garden WAP based experience known simply as Vodafone Live!

This dream of word dominance continued under Gent who didn't really see any reason why Vodafone couldn't have a presence in every market in the world because after all that's what great companies do. The problem was that there were significant stumbling blocks that Vodafone either ignored, or didn't see. Because Vodafone had built itself primarily on acquisitions they had a huge mix of radio gear, billing systems and networks from numerous different vendors and trying to roll out products and services across this network was damn near impossible. Around 18 months ago somebody inside Vodafone finally realised this and the "One Vodafone" concept was launched. Vodafone was now going to take advantage of the economies of scale that should be being achieved in a company of their size with the ultimate goal of outperforming their peers. There were going to be standardised plans for cell sites, core networks moved to IP, and network planning and purchasing that is negotiated on a global scale removing much of the decision making from individual networks. Phones were going to be heavily customised (because the walled garden of Live! was believed to attract people to the network) and heavily marketed because significant numbers of customers already know what model of handset they want before they go shopping for a phone. So with this big plan how could it all go wrong for Vodafone? Chris Gent stood down after taking Vodafone from a small startup in the UK to become the dominant player in the mobile world. His replacement Arun Sarin has been unpopular since his appointment and there have been plenty of fights inside the Vodafone boardroom, the most famous of which was Gent resigning as honorary life president earlier this year due to his disagreement of the direction Sarin was taking.

A few weeks ago they posted the biggest loss in European history of a whopping £14.9bn, primarily caused by writedowns of European networks that they paid far too much money for during the dotcom boom and excessive prices paid for 3G spectrum. While this loss is significant and Vodafone has £20bn in debt on it books things surely things can only be looking up for them, can't they? After all isn't the future of communications totally mobile?

Many people think so. After all, do you really need a landline phone if you have a mobile phone that can do exactly the same thing but is also portable? ...