Arun Sarin is making a surprise early exit from the chief executive's job at Vodafone after five years in which he has suffered boardroom whispers about his management style, seen off a shareholder revolt over strategy, resuscitated the company's operations in Europe and secured a vital place in the booming Indian market.
He will be replaced by Vittorio Colao, seven years his junior, who first joined the company in 2000 when it bought a stake in the Italian operator - now Vodafone Italy - that he ran. After an eventful two-year stint running RCS MediaGroup, one of Italy's biggest publishing companies, he rejoined Vodafone in 2006 as deputy chief executive.
Colao was tipped as being groomed for the chief executive's post, but Sarin stressed that internal and external candidates had been interviewed after he told chairman Sir John Bond, just after Christmas, that he wanted to retire at this year's annual meeting on July 29.
"When I came here five years ago, I had a certain set of things I wanted to do and I feel like I have done them," Sarin said.
Part of that "set of things" was to put a new management team in place to replace the old guard who served under his predecessor, Sir Christopher Gent. He also focused on costs within Vodafone's core European operations, in the face of declining prices as a result of regulation and fierce competition.
But his tenure has, at times, been troubled. After the expansionist Gent, who clinched the largest hostile takeover in UK corporate history when he snapped up Mannesmann in the days of the dotcom boom, Sarin was expected to focus on what the firm already owned.
But soon after he arrived he was embroiled in the multibillion-dollar auction of AT&T Wireless. Though the company was ultimately snapped up by Cingular in a deal that has since soured, Sarin's perceived indecision coloured the market's perception of him for years.
Any deal with AT&T Wireless would have meant selling Vodafone's half-share in its US joint venture Verizon Wireless. There have been grumblings about the future of that stake ever since and they came to a head last year when a group of dissident shareholders under former Marconi boss John Mayo tried to use Vodafone's annual meeting to force the board to sell out. They were comprehensively defeated.
When Sarin made his own first big acquisition - buying Turkish operator Telsim for £2.6bn - just over a year after the AT&T Wireless debacle, analysts balked at the price tag. Sarin has since been proved correct in his assessment of the business and it has become one of the engines of the company's international growth.
Gent, meanwhile, resigned his honorary position as life president of the firm in 2005 after a whispering campaign against Sarin carried out through the pages of the national press.
Sarin has also taken some tough decisions. After attempts to revive Vodafone's Japanese operation he eventually decided to sell out. That was a U-turn, but freed him to trade a 10% stake in India's largest mobile phone company for control of Hutchison Essar, which has become one of the fastest-growing areas of the business.
Sarin said yesterday that he has enjoyed his time at Vodafone "enormously" but reckons it is time to take a break. "I am 53½ and what is clear to me is I would like to take a little sabbatical. I have been working since 1978. But if you ask me am I going to just retire, I think I have one more thing left in me."
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