The Reorg Of The Vodafone

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The Reorg Of The Vodafone

By: David Utter
2006-04-07

Global cellphone sales giant Vodafone announced a reorganization of its structure, and shifted several executives around the corner offices. Vodafone (VOD) disclosed in a statement the changes in its organizational structure and new appointments to take effect on May 1st.

The Reorg Of The Vodafone

The company cited three principles to the organizational shift:

• To drive operational benefits and cost reduction from local and regional scale in more mature markets.
• To drive profitable growth from the company’s emerging market portfolio.
• To position the company to capture new revenue streams by extending its reach into converged and IP services.

Bill Morrow leaves his position as president of Vodafone's Japan business to take the CEO role for the Europe business unit at Vodafone; Tim Miles, current Vodafone UK CEO, steps over and takes the CTO position.

The CEO of the Central Europe, Middle East, Asia Pacific, and Affiliates business unit will be Paul Donovan, who is currently CEO of Other Vodafone Subsidiaries. He will oversee building Vodafone's business in emerging markets. Those will include Verizon Wireless, China Mobile, Vodacom, and SFR.

Thomas Geitner gets the CEO role for the New Businesses and Innovation unit, the third of the three created with the reorganization. He will yield the company's CTO position to accept this role in the new structure, where he will oversee Research & Development and other functions.

All three CEOs and CFO Andy Halford will report to Vodafone Group CEO Arun Sarin, who called the new structure "an important step forward for the Group as it is aligned with our evolving strategy."

Elsewhere in telecoms - Verizon (VZ) announced it would form a strategic alliance with Adobe (ADBE) to construct a Flash Mobile ecosystem.

This should make Verizon the first US wireless firm to introduce mobile handsets equipped with Macromedia Flash technology, now owned by Adobe. The Flash Lite player from Macromedia has been developed specifically for mobile phones.

AT&T (T) group president Forrest Miller told corporate executives in Beijing that China needed to deregulate its telecom market ahead of the 2008 Olympics.

"While China is making noteworthy progress in opening markets since its WTO accession, there have been restrictive shifts as well," Miller said. AT&T and other foreign telecoms chafe at the intense regulatory atmosphere imposed by Beijing.

Sprint Nextel (S) has been active at the CTIA Wireless 2006 show in Las Vegas. Its Mobile Broadband Wireless Access Router could become an instant entry into households as a competitor to other ISPs.

Business users who have a Sprint Mobile Broadband Connection Card can insert it into the wireless router and create an instant WiFi hotspot for other machines in a home network.

Alltel (AT) has been moving up today, to 65.37. The company recently announced it would make mobile content services for BREW-enabled phones available from Jamster, a subsidiary of VeriSign (VRSN).

Jamster ringtones, games and graphics will be available to Alltel subscribers through the Axcess Shop on select Motorola and LG handsets. Later this year, additional BREW handsets that are used by Alltel subscribers will be Jamster-content compatible.

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Tags: Vodafone, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint Nextel

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View All Articles by David Utter

About the Author:
David Utter is a staff writer for InternetFinancialNews and WebProNews covering technology and business.


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