Vittorio Colao’s great gift was to turn from buyer to seller, says Jim Armitage

When Vittorio Colao loped his lanky frame into Vodafone’s Newbury headquarters a decade ago, the place was rather a mess.

His predecessor Arun Sarin had never quite emerged from the shadows of the big-ego founders’ generation who built the business through swashbuckling acquisitions.

At the time, the City loved those deals, even though many turned out to be massively destructive for shareholders. Mannesmann was bought for £156 billion and is now on the books at £56 billion.

The main winners were the bankers: would Simon Dingemans have agreed last week not to take a payoff when he exits his current job at GlaxoSmithKline had he not earned so much running the Voda M&A account for Goldman Sachs?

Anyway, after all that bonus-fuelled excitement, Voda ended up as a vast, consumer-mobile monster. Many of the takeovers were of only partial stakes in faraway businesses where it had no management control. That included places Voda should never have been, such as protectionist France — where étranger capitalists rarely prosper.

The US Verizon partnership was a fabulously successful exception. Its huge, reliable dividends papered the cracks of Voda’s failings elsewhere. But on the whole, Voda had gone from being an entrepreneurial business-builder to some kind of weird investment trust.

Colao turned it from a company with a reputation for buying, into a major seller. He ditched swathes of minority stakes, even selling Verizon to return £54 billion to investors. The proceeds went into building new fixed and mobile networks across Europe, readying Voda for 5G mobile communications and superfast broadband. While BT bought Premier League football, Colao laid pipes and cables.

Now, from being a consumer mobile company, it’s getting big in fixed line broadband, with high speed customers in 25 countries. And you’re as likely to have Voda running your company network as your personal mobile.

Colao’s not just been selling businesses. Only last week he bought Liberty’s huge European cable and broadband assets. That deal will be time-consuming for his successor Nick Read to bed down, but bring big cross-selling opportunities from Voda’s mobile operations. And therein lies Read’s task: to find more customers for the infrastructure Colao has built. That means getting us all to buy our mobile, broadband and TV from him. “Convergence”, as it’s known.

Back in the nineties, financial services bosses claimed we’d all buy our banking and insurance products from one-stop shop “bancassurers”. It caught on in Europe but died a death over here. Savvy Brits realised we got better deals shopping around for stuff individually.

Perhaps similarly, Voda is having success in Europe with “convergence”. Whether it succeeds in the UK remains to be seen. We’ll have to see how persuasive Read turns out to be.