Argentina

"While Gibbs watched a jet ‘bombing’ structures on his farm in October 1999, for a sixtieth birthday party treat, he had a team of engineers working away in the English Midlands on his amphibious car project. Hundreds of thousands of man-hours later, by the time Richard Serra’s *Te Tuhirangi Contour* was launched in February 2003, the team at Gibbs Technologies had nearly completed the world’s first high-speed amphibian legally permitted to drive fast on land and water. Gibbs presented the Aquada to the international media in London in September 2003, and the world was interested. Clips of the Aquada operating as a sports car on the road, then driving down a ramp and seconds later taking off as a jet boat fast across the water were the most downloaded items on the World Wide Web for more than 24 hours. Television stations from Turkey to Argentina covered the story with fascination."

"We made our first foray in 2019 when we acquired a majority stake in the bankrupt Colombian telecoms company Avantel, merged it with a vehicle that we had used to buy Colombian mobile telecoms spectrum, and renamed the whole operation WOM Colombia. We then set about investing in infrastructure projects in Colombia over the next five years. Following a bandwidth auction, we won 20 MHz in the 700 MHz spectrum and 30 MHz in the 2,500 MHz spectrum. We then invested in building WOM Colombia’s network, installing more than 8,000 antennae and 3,000 additional towers, and created 2,500 direct and more than 5,000 indirect jobs, with an average age of 32 for recruits. We were probably Colombia’s largest recruiter, opening 147 stores in one year alone. Altogether, we have invested $1 billion of equity in WOM Colombia. We betted heavily that the strategy that had worked so well in Chile would resonate with customers in the much larger Colombian market. It often surprises Europeans that Colombia is the second largest market in South America, after Brazil but before Argentina and Peru, with an official population of more than 57 million, plus what is reported to be more than 5 million Venezuelans."