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SARIN
DIALS INTO INDIA
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INDIA EMPIRE BUREAU
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The New
Raiders
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 February could hardly rank as a favourite for Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin—at least not in recent years. It was in February 2004 that Sarin, then a relatively new chief executive of British mobile giant, was forced to throw in the towel in the battle to win control of U.S. mobile carrier AT&T Wireless, marking the end of his honeymoon with investors.
And then last February, Vodafone announced an asset write-down of more than $45 billion, leading the group to report the biggest-ever loss by a European company three months later. But Sarin appears to have finally broken the February jinx, as Vodafone on February 11 came up trumps in the auction for a controlling stake in India’s No. 4 mobile operator, Hutchison Essar, beating spirited competition from at least three other bidders. India-born Sarin has been under pressure to address slowing growth in Vodafone’s core European markets, and taking a big slice of the world’s second-biggest and fastest growing mobile phone market should help..
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Sarin cut his teeth at US telecoms group Pacific Telesis, from which AirTouch was spun off in 1994. As AirTouch’s president and chief operator officer, he helped sell the group to Vodafone for a hefty $66.5 billion in 1999
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The key, however, is whether he can convince investors he has not overpaid for Hutchison Telecommunications International Ltd.’s 67 percent stake in Hutchison Essar. Vodafone’s offer gives Hutch Essar a total value, including debt, of $18.8 billion, making it Sarin’s biggest acquisition since joining as CEO some three years ago, and Vodafone’s largest since its $231 billion purchase of Germany’s Mannesmann in 2000 -- the world’s biggest ever takeover deal. The son of an Indian military officer, Sarin was sent to a military boarding school in Bangalore, now India’s answer to Silicon Valley in the United States. He went on to study engineering at the elite Indian Institute of Technology in
Kharagpur.
Sarin spent much of the next three decades in California. He came to the US in the 1970s and gained a degree in engineering and an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley, in 1978.
Sarin cut his teeth at U.S. telecoms group Pacific Telesis, from which AirTouch was spun off in 1994. As AirTouch’s president and chief operator officer, he helped sell the group to Vodafone for a hefty $66.5 billion in 1999. At Vodafone, Sarin took over the enlarged group’s operations in the United States, Asia and Australasia, but left in 2000 after the firm rolled its U.S. interests into Verizon Wireless.
In the interlude before returning, Sarin was chief executive of Internet software supplier Infospace, ran US venture capital group Accel-KKR Telecom and remained a Vodafone non-executive director.
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The New Raiders
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March 2007
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