Copy-Paste Playbook Transplants

“Branding is a personal passion of mine, dating back all the way to the Bravo venture in St Petersburg, and it felt exciting and invigorating to be essentially building a start-up again. But what should we call our new baby? After discarding an initial notion to use the Play brand, we looked for a similarly dynamic name behind which to build a challenger, customer-centric culture and asked half a dozen marketing agencies to pitch their best ideas. None of them came up with anything that we liked, but another firm which had not been invited to pitch came up with a left-of-field suggestion that resonated with us straight away. Its concept was to brand the challenger around the ‘word-of-mouth’, viral way that we wanted to grow through personal recommendations offering great value and customer-centred service. ‘Word of mouth’ was shortened to WOM and that became our brand. My idea was to build a new Latin American challenger mobile telecoms brand using the playbook of Play in Poland and Nova in Iceland. I could use the same management team and external consultants who worked on both. The partners at Novator responsible for telecoms, who had worked with me since 2010, focused on financing the new venture and acquiring the necessary spectrum and telecoms licences. Chris Bannister, a personable Brit who became Play’s first chief executive in 2005 and had already lived and worked in nine countries, was brought back into the fold as chief executive. And the Icelandic chief technology officer oversaw the technical build-out design, along with his Swedish colleague. Members of our trusted teams from both countries helped in the beginning to transform a failed old-school US telecoms operator into a state-of-the-art ‘kick-ass’ mobile challenger. None of us spoke Spanish and most had never set foot in Latin America before, let alone Chile. It didn’t seem to matter. When we launched, Chile was the most expensive country in the Latin American region in mobile telecommunication, so we saw a market that was fertile for a new approach. Conventional new entrants like Nextel and a venture headed by US telecoms billionaire John Malone had failed to crack the nation. We needed to do things very differently. To achieve the maximum impact and truly disrupt the market, we knew that a key differentiator had to be price. Indeed, we priced our services so aggressively that Chile immediately became the cheapest country in South America for consumer mobile telephony. Alongside this value offer, we promoted WOM as an independent challenger offering honesty and integrity. We set out to be brave, innovative, bold and passionate.”

“When I was on the cover of *Forbes* magazine in 2005 Bulgaria’s media lapped it up. ‘Our Thor is On The List,’ ran the headlines. Their Thor? They had nobody of their own on the list, so they adopted me. I was an honorary Bulgarian. I was an outsider, but when it was positive news I was theirs. It felt good to be cherished. I felt that my time had come. However, high on the success of my pharma investments, I decided to copy the model in telecoms and try to repeat the Pharmaco story. I had bought a huge cash cow in the form of Bulgaria’s state telecom company, although it needed massive modernisation which we committed to by introducing fibre and mobile phone service. Now all I needed to do was reverse that company into a Scandinavian listed company with access to listed capital markets and use them to buy more telecom companies in the region (the East-to-West arbitrage). I wanted to do a copy-and-paste of what I had already done in Iceland, and I got the chance to try it in Finland. I managed to acquire the biggest single shareholding of the listed Finnish telecom Elisa, a conservative company more than 100 years old and the only Scandinavian telecom operator with no international assets. This was a no-brainer to me, and I thought the investors would welcome someone with a new vision of modernising their company and fully using its potential for scale with merger ideas and ready-made connections in eastern Europe. But that’s when I hit a wall.”