Vodafone's money men come under friendly fire

J-Phone exec takes aim at major shareholder...

By Jon Bernstein, 3 September 2001 07:14

NEWS Vodafone CEO Chris Gent and his management team know everything about the finance but very little about marketing and day-to-day operations. That's the view from the chief executive-elect at fellow mobile operator, J-Phone. Goichi Yoshizawa's verdict that Vodafone "is good at the money game but not in operations" is even more surprising given Vodafone's role as majority shareholder in J-Phone. Yoshizawa, who made his comments in a Financial Times interview, said Vodafone should have learnt from the marketing expertise of Orange, the operator it briefly owned when it took over Mannesmann last year. On the plus side, Yoshizawa said Vodafone's 200 million subscribers would proved a useful bargaining tool when forming alliances with infrastructure and handset makers.

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