End of an era as Vodafone boss Vittorio Colao hands over to protégé
London — Vodafone CE Vittorio Colao will step down in October after 10 years in which the Italian reshaped the world’s second-largest mobile operator into a digital communications powerhouse with a string of major deals. The urbane Colao will be replaced by Nick Read, finance director since 2014, whose broad international experience had marked him out as the likely next leader of a group with 536 million mobile customers and €47bn in revenue. He will take charge of a group that, under Colao, pulled back from its once brazen expansionist drive, most notably when it sold out of the US with a $130bn exit from a joint venture with Verizon. "We have taken a company which was mostly consumer, mostly mobile, very spread with a lot of monorities, and have turned it into a powerhouse of convergence, with only controlled or co-controlled companies and a very strong enterprise business," Colao said. Last week Vodafone struck a $21.8bn deal to buy Liberty Global’s cable TV and broadband network...
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