Posted: July 12th, 2019
Vodafone – Business Environment
Vodafone is the largest mobile communication network in the world, which operates its business across 65 countries around Europe, Americas, Middle East &Africa and Asia & Australia. (Vodafone. com) Its headquarters is in Newbury, Berkshire, England, UK, and it currently had a market share of i?? 75 billion. Its name Vodafone represents Voice Data and Fone (phone), and the company chooses this name to “reflect the provision of voice and data services over mobile phones”. (Mobiletor. com, 2007)
Vodafone has 260 million customers in the world, which just behind China Mobile on this measure, has 415 million customer, resulting in vodafone is the second largest operator in the world. (Forbes. com, 2008) In the beginning, Vodafone wasn’t named Vodafone; it was a form of subsidiary of Racal Electronics Plc in 1984. After that, people called it Racal Telecom Limited in 1988. 3 years later, this company had totally demerged from Racal Telecom Limited and became the independent company, Vodafone Group Plc. In 1999, it changed its name to Vodafone AirTouch after its merger with AirTouch.
However, the formal name Vodafone Group Plc had recovered since the stakeholder general meeting in 2000. (Vodafone. com, 2008) Key current business Vodafone now concentrate on 2 businesses; one is integrated mobile service, and another is PC communication service. For mobile, Vodafone uses 3G and HSDPA (High-Speed Download Packet Access). For PC, the old way was used, like DSL (Digital Subscriber Line). For rich segmentation, Vodafone offers high speed internet access. For their technologies, customers are able to connect the internet either at home or on their way. Sponsorship
Vodafone became McLaren F1 title sponsor since 2006, and Vodafone became the “Official Mobile Partner” of the team. Vodafone benefits from this activity for several areas. One advantage for that is being a partner of F1 can continue to raise brand awareness because F1 is so popular. Another pro for Vodafone is this might be the first footprint for expanding its product or service to other field. Strategy Vodafone’s current strategy was set out in May, 2006, which announces that “to address the mobile industry’s changing environment and to draw upon the Group’s strengths”.
(Vodafone, 2008) To be simple, the world today is changing all the time, it’s very hard to set out a fixed strategy and follow it all the time no matter the world has changed or not. Especially for this industry, this high technology indusrty. Vodafone see the certain circumstances and make the suitable strategy. That can lead them go futher in this field. Organization Structure Vodafone’s organization structure is similar with some other multi-national companies, which has a group CEO in headquarter, and several CEOs response for different regions.
Like Vittorio Colao is the CEO for the whole group, Michel Comes is the CEO who sees to the Europe Region, Nick Read takes the responsibility for Asia-Pacific & Middle East Region, and Morten Lundal is the CEO for Central Europe &Africa Region. Then, for each region, there are different CEOs for different countries. Besides, under the group CEO, there are CFO Group HR, Group Business Development, Group Strategy & Business Improvement, Group Legal and Group External Affairs as well Personal opinion, this kind of structure for Vodafone is best.
The reason for that is Functional organization can group the people with similar specialism and technical expertise. For different regions, a big company seems break into several small companies, and there are complete members to manage the firm. As a benefit, different small companies can also to compete with each other. In the end, this structure can raise employees’ motivation. I won’t change the structure if I had the authority because I just think this is perfect for Vodafone. (Appendix 1)
