Who are the most influential women in mobile?

Last year we compiled a list of the most influential people in the mobile industry. It was a fascinating exercise, and one that proved controversial in places. But perhaps the most interesting thing about the list was who wasn’t on it. Of the 40 people included, only one was female. Clearly there are very few women occupying the most senior positions within the companies that make up the industry.

And that got us thinking. If the top jobs are dominated by men, who are the most senior women in the industry, and what are their jobs?

Telecoms.com and Mobile Communications International magazine are setting out to find the most influential women in the mobile industry – and we want your help. We already have an idea of some of the women who we’ll be profiling but we’re pretty sure you’ll have ideas of your own, and we want to hear them.

Either send your suggestions and comments to:  mike.hibberd@informa.com or post them in the comments box below.

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Big hitters: 40 leaders who are shaping the industry

Under the influence

Who really holds the reins in the mobile communications industry?  This is a question with an endless answer, so intricate and complex are the webs which create the mobile services on which billions of people rely every day.

The mobile communications sector is chock full of influential people, so compiling a list of 40 key executives is not a simple task. There were hundreds of people that could have been included and so this list is by no means exhaustive. It does, however give an idea of who some of the most powerful people in mobile are. It’s not always the CEOs, for example. A rung or two down the ladder are the people directly responsible for developing products, setting individual strategies and planning out the future of the industry.

And not all the large companies in the industry are represented because there simply wasn’t room. Some entries (or absences) might surprise the reader, but subjectivity is inherent in any list like this. Some entries are there simply because we think they’re interesting. These people may not wield billion dollar budgets, but the impact of their work is certainly being felt.

It’s important to remember, as well, that this is not a ranking. We’re not saying that the person at the front of the list is more important than the person at the back; the entries are in alphabetical order.  No doubt readers will have their own opinions to add, and we’d love to hear them. Please  let us know what you think.

César Alierta Izuel, Telefónica

Vivek Badrinath, NGNMA

Simon Beresford Wylie, NSN

Andrew Bud,
mBlox

Andrea Casalini, Buongiorno

Peter Chou,
HTC

Vittorio Colao, Vodafone Group

Jay Freeman,
Cydia

Scott Forstall,
Apple

Morgan Gillis, LiMO Foundation

Dr. Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm

Stephen Hayes, 3GPP SG

Mitsunobu Komori, NTT DoCoMo

Ilja Laurs,
GetJar

Mike Lazaridis, Research In Motion

Andrew Lees, Microsoft

Didier Lombard, France Telecom

Masayoshi Son, Softbank Group

Lowell McAdam, Verizon Wireless

Sunil Bharti Mittal, Bharti Enterprises

Bill Morrow, Clearwire

Boris Nemsic, Vimpelcom

Michael O’Hara, GSM Association

René Obermann, Deutsche Telekom

Dr. Kai Öistämö, Nokia

Dr. Tero Ojanperä,

Nokia

Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook

Viviane Reding, European Commission

Ren Zhengfei,
Huawei

Andy Rubin,

Google

Dr. Saad al Barrak, Zain

Patrick Slim Domit, America Movil

K Shin, Samsung Mobile

Sultan A. Bahabri, Hits Telecom

Dr Hamadoun Touré, ITU

Ben Verwaayen, Alcatel Lucent

Hans Vestberg, Ericsson

Jon von Tetzchner, Opera

Wang Jianzhou, China Mobile

Lee Williams, Symbian Foundation

Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for the Information Society and Media

Probably the most influential woman in the mobile industry, Commissioner Reding has not won a great deal of friends among mobile operators. Whether you see her as a slick, populist politician interfering in a market that is best left to set its own levels, or as a consumer champion who has broken the back of cosy operator pricing cartels, there is no denying her impact.

With a seemingly boundless enthusiasm for forcing operators to cut their prices, Reding’s willingness to regulate on retail as well as wholesale roaming charges is seen universally among carriers as a step too far. Individually and collectively—through the GSMA—most have complained that natural market forces would have brought prices down without her intervention. That, of course, can never be proven. But it’s unlikely that prices would have fallen as far or as fast if operators had been left to their own devices. Reding shows no signs of slowing down and her next target will be data access roaming charges.

Memorably at the Mobile World Congress in 2008, having been denied the opportunity to speak about what she wanted to during the GSMA press conference, Reding led the assembled journalists outside and gave an impromptu speech on some steps. She will not be ignored.

Ren Zhengfei, founder and chairman, Huawei

Since founding the firm in 1988, Ren Zhengfei has built Chinese vendor Huawei into arguably the most disruptive infrastructure player in the mobile market. When the next of the big name vendors exits the market through one route or another, and it really is a matter of ‘when’ and not ‘if’, then it won’t be an exaggeration to lay a portion of the responsibility for this at Huawei’s door.

In fairness to Western vendors, they have never had the opportunity to run a company in the way that Huawei’s founder has. With access to a huge workforce which demanded far lower rates of pay than their Western counterparts, Huawei marketed itself initially to the MNOs on price, picking up business in emerging markets from carriers with less money to spend. While this kept the firm out of the top tier carrier market during its early years in the game, the situation today is altogether different.

Now an established provider to the premier league of mobile carriers, Huawei is in an even better position to press home its advantage. While other vendors have slashed at their costs in a frantic bid for survival, Ren Zhengfei has kept Huawei’s R&D budget high.

Ten per cent of Huawei’s annual revenue is diverted into R&D. In 2008, revenues were up 46 per cent year on year to $23.3bn (with 75 per cent of those sales coming from outside of China). And that budget goes a long way in China; half of the firm’s workforce are engaged in research and development.

Couple this with enormous credit facilities from Chinese state banks that allow Huawei to offer the kind of financing that’s a distant memory to Western vendors and you’ve got a very serious challenge to the established order. At one time it looked likely that Huawei would move to acquire a Western vendor in order to build global presence. Now it doesn’t seem necessary. Ren Zhengfei heads a company that, at just 21 years’ old, threatens firms with  histories that stretch back more than a century.

Andy Rubin, head of mobile platforms, Google

Google tends to get what it wants, and what it wants from Andy Rubin is a smartphone platform that can rival the likes of Symbian and Apple. Rubin’s Android platform has offered an alternative to handset vendors concerned that, by sticking with Symbian, they will effectively be strengthening Nokia, their number one competitor.

The Open Handset Alliance, the grouping used to develop the Android platform and enable the creation of the first high profile, overtly open source handsets, boasts an impressive membership list. The world’s leading carriers, silicon vendors, software developers and handset manufacturers have all congregated around Rubin’s platform. Only Nokia is absent.

What he lacks now is scale. At the time of writing there are three Android handsets in the market, all from Taiwanese vendor HTC, and all touch-screen based. Rubin has said that the Android platform can function with all interface formats, including keypad and trackball and has promised that a greater variety of handsets are forthcoming. Rubin has the potential for enormous impact on the sector, by changing the balance in the OS options for a range of handset vendors, and by clearing a path that could put Google and its many applications into an awful lot of pockets.

Dr. Saad al Barrak, chairman, Zain

The man behind one of the most remarkable growth stories of recent years, Saad al Barrak has built Zain into the dominant cellular force in the MEA region. He now boasts operations in 22 countries and a customer base approaching 65 million at the end of Q109.

His preparedness to spend eye-watering sums of money when necessary—most famously more than $6bn for the third licence in Saudi Arabia—has, on occasion, called his deal making into question, though. Critics have suggested that the once bottomless Zain coffers now echo in emptiness, and argued that Al Barrak has taken the firm to the point where it is dangerously over-leveraged.

His ambitious plan to turn Zain into a truly global player in three, three-year evolutionary steps looks to have hit stumbling blocks in the current financial climate and it became clear in the early summer that the firm was looking to offload its painstakingly built African portfolio.

Spoken about with reverence by Zain employees, perhaps Al Barrak’s greatest achievement has been the creation of a borderless African network, where roaming charges are not incurred. This has attracted attention from the likes of Viviane Reding, who sees it as a potential blueprint for Europe. But, again, detractors have asserted that the project has cost the firm financially.

Whether he will find the funds to carry on growing, or whether he will look to break up his rapidly built empire is what onlookers are waiting to find out.

Patrick Slim Domit, chairman America Movil

The son of Carlos Slim, one of the three richest men in the world, Patrick Slim Domit inherited from his father the number one spot at the third largest mobile carrier group in the world, by subscriber numbers.

America Movil had just short of 190 million customers at the end of Q109 according to Informa Telecoms & Media’s World Cellular Investors service. The fi rm operates in 15 Latin American countries, as well as Jamaica and the US.

Unrivalled in Latin America (America Movil’s closest competitor is Telefónica) the big debate for Slim Jr now is whether or not he will attempt to expand the carrier business into other territories. It is not inconceivable that he might. His father, who remains involved in the strategic direction of the carrier, was able to capitalise on the 1982 economic crisis in his native Mexico—when banks were nationalised and the country’s fi nances all but paralysed—by  investing heavily in the nation, buying up a diverse range of assets. Might a global crisis precipitate a global spending spree?

Slim now ranks alongside the likes of Sunil Bharti Mittal and Saad Al Barak in the mobile industry as the leader of a developing market powerhouse that could well upset the established order by moving into more mature markets, or by combining forces with a developed market suitor.

JK Shin, head of Samsung Mobile Communications

Korean vendor Samsung has established itself as the closest thing Nokia has to a challenger in the global mobile handset market, and JK Shin is the man leading the charge.

With a market share hovering just above 19 per cent at the end of the first quarter of 2009 from sales of 51.4 million units, Shin’s approach to the handset market is distinctly promiscuous.

Samsung has a finger in most of the competing operating system pies, allying itself to no one camp in particular. Such a strategy has strengths and weaknesses, of course, depending on your point of view. On the one hand the fi rm should be able to keep pace with whatever is proving popular in the fickle environment of mobile handset design but, on the other, a fragmented approach such as this runs the risk of spreading company focus too thinly.

Its most recently released handset, the Jet, was built on a propietary platform, however, suggesting that Shin doesn’t necessarily believe that industry groupings have all the answers.

Dr Sultan A. Bahabri, chairman Hits Telecom

A medical doctor by training, Sultan A.Bahabri was drawn to the telecommunications field by the possibilities it offered for e-health initiatives. He founded Hits Telecom to bid for the second GSM licence in Saudi Arabia in 2003. While his bid was unsuccessful (as was a second attempt, losing to Zain in 2007), Hits went into business with licence winner Etisalat, providing customer care and distribution services.

The firm now operates in Tanzania, Liberia, Equatorial Guinea and the DRC in Africa, has a presence in Spain and an operation in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo.

Bahabri describes Hits as a “version 3.0 company”, with a global presence from the first days of operation. He insists the firm is highly adaptable and is open to a variety of models for its expansion. Physical networks and asset ownership may work in one market, while an MVNO launch may suit another. Bahabri has hinted at a move into the Chinese market, but has offered no details as to the form it would take.

He wants to target the mid tier of communications consumers, and argues that in doing so he will create “a new league” of operators.

Cost management is key to Hits and Bahabri warns against the “dangerous combination of ego and cash” that “leads to so many mistakes” from operators investing in new markets. His medical background remains key to Hits Telecom, he told MCI in June, and the firm is planning a major e-health initiative in partnership with at least one large medical non-profit organisation.

This should launch in one African market before the end of the year, he said, with more to follow in 2010. Bahabri believes that carriers’ key assets today are intangible, that the network has become a commodity and that most of the big western vendors are set to disappear soon. He claims his firm’s finances are solid, it’s not leveraged and his plans for expansion, while changing all the time in reaction to world economic markets, remain very much on track. If this is the case, definitely one to watch.