Arun Sarin

The CEO(Chief Executive Officer) of the Britian-based telecom major Vodafone Group plc., Arun Sarin was born on October 21, 1954 at Panchmari, Madhya Pradesh. After doing his schooling from the military boarding school in Bangalore, Arun graduated from IIT Kharagpur in 1975. During his school and IIT days, he excelled in studies, sports and various extracurricular activities. Thereafter, he moved to the United States where he did his MS in Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1977, going on to complete an MBA from the same university in 1978. The same year he started his career with a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm. In 1981 he moved on to Natomas as a corporate development manager. He started his telecom career in 1984, when he joined the Pacific Telesis Group in San Francisco. The year 1995 saw Arun Sarin launching a new wireless-communications company with his mentor Sam Ginn. Arun Sarin served as the President and Chief Operating Officer of AirTouch from 1997 to 1999. The year 1999 saw AirTouch and Vodafone merging to form Vodafone-AirTouch, where he became the chief executive. Arun Sarin resigned from Vodafone-AirTouch in 2000 and became the CEO at InfoSpace, an Internet infrastructure company. He moved away from Infospace in July 2001 and started a telecommunications company called Accel-KKR Telecom. In 2003, Arun became the CEO of Vodafone. He became the CEO of Vodafone after its takeover driven expansion phase between 1999 and 2002. He has focused his energies on emerging markets like India. Under his stewardship, Vodafone successfully bid U$11.1 billion for a majority stake in the Indian mobile operator, Hutch.