When Lord MacLaurin, Chairman of Vodafone Group Plc announced that Arun Sarin will take over as the Company's CEO, he surprised many an analyst in the City. Vodafone Group is reposing high hopes on Sarin to continue pushing the company into new frontiers after the accomplishments of Sir Christopher Gent, its current CEO. When Sir Gent took became the company's CEO in 1997, Vodafone was a small operator and its market value was placed at 7.5 billion Pounds.

Today, it is valued at 75 billion Pounds and is reckoned to be the largest wireless telephone company in the world. Sir Gent will retire on 30 July 2003. What prompted this change in the guards is one key question that many an analyst in the City will be mulling about. Analysts are also equally wondering about the replacement. Most of them are betting that the replacement will help Vodafone to expand into US, a place where it has minimal presence. They believe that Vodafone has based its decision on the fact that Sarin lives and works in California and is aware of the US market dynamics.

Arun Sarin was born in India in the year 1954 in an army family. He graduated in Engineering from the IIT Kharagpur in 1975. Then, he went to the University of California, at Berkeley. There, he gained an MS in Engineering and an MBA. After his studies, he started working as a Management consultant. In 1984, he joined the Pacific Telesis Group in San Francisco. Since then, he worked in the wireless industry and is considered to have extensive inside knowledge of the mobile telecommunications industry.

When Pacific Telesis group decided to de-merge its mobile and paging businesses, Sarin joined the newly formed AirTouch Communications. Initially, he was a Senior Vice President, Corporate Strategy and Development with Air Touch. As a Vice President, Sarin was actively involved in a lot of acquisitions and partnerships. When he became the CEO of AirTouch, he was responsible for managing the cellular and paging operations in 14 countries.

When Vodafone took over AirTouch's business, Sarin joined as its CEO US/Asia Pacific region. He managed Vodafone's operations in the US, Asia and Australia. Sarin also headed the Global Technology division that is responsible for the introduction of wireless internet services. In 2000, Sarin resigned as the CEO of Vodafone's operations and joined as a CEO of InfoSpace Inc., a very small Internet software and content organisation, in the US.

However, he continued to retain the non-executive directorship of Vodafone AirTouch Plc. In 2001, Sarin joined Accel-KKR Telecom, a telecom investment and management business. Besides the non executive directorship of Vodafone, Sarin is a director in Charles Schwab Corp., Cisco Systems, Gap Inc. and Accel-KKR Company. He is also a director of several non profit and educational organizations.