 "Sunil Sood")
He has been a hardcore operations man, hired by former Vodafone India boss (formerly Hutchison) Asim Ghosh from PepsiCo, a company which he helped set shop in India.
The low-profile Sunil Sood, 54, who's also had a stint in Nestle, will be taking over from the outspoken Marten Pieters as the new managing director and chief executive of Vodafone India, with effect from April 1.
Pieters, with a home base in both Capetown and Netherlands, will remain on the board of directors in a non-executive capacity. He steps down after six years in the company, during which he doubled the revenue, nearly tripled its subscriber base and pushed its rural consumer base nearly fivefold. Operating earnings' margins also improved.
Sood is an old hand, of 14 years, in Vodafone. His tryst with telecom began as the vice-president, sales and marketing, for Hutch in Delhi, one of its most profitable circles. This was followed by stints as head of businesses in circles as varied as Gujarat, Kolkata and Chennai, providing him a hands-on understanding of the diverse markets. He then took over as director-business operations, west and south, before being catapulted as the chief operating officer three years earlier, in an exercise which was clearly positioning him to take over the top slot once Pieters stepped down.
Those who've worked with him say he was key man behind the company’s aggressive rural strategy, an area where the company had not concentrated earlier, preferring to address the high-Arpu (average revenue per user) urban markets. “He has amazing anecdotal stories to tell you about the ground realities of different markets, as he is a hands-on operations man,” says a Vodafone insider who has closely worked with him.
Insiders say with Pieters wanting to call it a day a few years earlier, Sood was already looking at the daily operations and profit and loss management of all telecom circles. He also directed the company’s new push towards mobile commerce.
As with many top managers in the country, he has an impressive background — St Columba's, Delhi; B Tech from IIT Delhi; PGDM from IIM Kolkata. He is also an alumnus of Harvard Business School (AMP).
Sood learnt his ropes in running operations from Nestle and PepsiCo At the latter, he worked with former India boss P M Sinha for around six years, in sales and marketing and then as chief executive of the beverage company in Bangladesh. “He was a hand-on operations man whom I sent to Bangladesh to look after our franchise operations. He knows the ground realities,” says his former boss, Sinha. Prior to that, he spent four years with Nestle in Nigeria, where he was working to establish the market for its milk and infant formulae.
A lover of art, who takes active interest in promoting talent, and who relaxes by swimming or listening to music, faces some tough challenges.
Pieters has been one of the most outspoken chief executives in the telecom business, who publicly shook everyone by saying it was difficult to do business in India. He has also been in the forefront of leading regulatory changes in the country, whether in opposing high prices for spectrum or asking for more, as representative of the GSM segment. Sood, the operations man, will now has to straddle this rough and tumble world of regulatory challenges, apart from combating the two big changes -- entry of Reliance Jio and the 4G LTE data revolution.
