WOM

"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 realised at the beginning of 2024 that Chile was not going to be able to generate any spare cash to recycle to Colombia, finding a partner to put in the last bit of cash became hugely urgent, and I concentrated all year on that. After reaching out to more than 300 parties globally through an investment bank process and endless presentations from Brazil and New York to Dubai and Mexico, and despite coming close more than once, we failed to secure the right commitment on time. The key element that killed the deal was that Colombia had elected a left-wing government for the first time since the Second World War. The new government was headed by a Marxist president who had served jail time in his youth as a revolutionary guerrilla. This macroeconomic red flag really disturbed both international and local Colombian investors. Everyone liked the WOM story and the copy-and-paste strategy of rolling out a tried and tested business model from Poland, Iceland and Chile. But the big local Colombian investors simply said, ‘We are going to sit this government out and not do anything new while they are in power.’ If this was the local view, just imagine what the US investors thought."

"This strategy produced exactly the required results, with WOM living up to its name and growing virally through recommendations. Nobody in the Chilean mobile telecoms industry had seen anything like this before. The received wisdom had been that there was no room in the Chilean mobile telecoms market for more than three operators and that nobody would be able to successfully challenge that status quo. We proved this to be incorrect. WOM quickly became an unmissable part of the market, bigger than its Mexican- and Spanish-owned rivals and a close contender for the number one position. What it did and said really mattered to the nation’s population. We developed genuine momentum and impact."