What Vodafone should do with its huge windfall: invest it in the next Vodafone

Vodafone, which has just collected an £84 billion windfall from the sale of its 45 per cent stake in Verizon Wireless of the US, is either a hero or an anti-hero of British capitalism, according to taste. To me, the world’s second-largest mobile phone business is heroic because it achieved that position from a standing start just 30 years ago, when poker-playing Ernie Harrison, chief executive of a military radio manufacturer called Racal, bet everything he had on the future of mobile telephony. At a time when other electronics companies thought it too uncertain a prospect to bother trying to compete against the monopolistic British Telecom, Harrison and his colleague Gerry Whent started Vodafone (originally Racal Telecom) in a small office in Newbury, and grabbed half the UK market. It was the most important British start-up of the 1980s, the only one to compare with the new giants of the US technology scene.