Pioneer stuck to his guns and ended up making a fortune

Before long, the chairman of Britain's third-largest company will be living more than 6,000 miles from head office.

Before long, the chairman of Britain's third-largest company will be living more than 6,000 miles from head office.

Even in the era of the global mega-corporation, this may seem a stretch. But Mr Sam Ginn, chairman of AirTouch, has made a career - and a fortune - out of sticking to his guns, and he doesn't plan to change now.

His two young grandchildren are in San Francisco, he says, so he simply can't leave: his wife wouldn't let him. He also displays an obvious reluctance to let go of the California-based company he built into the world's biggest pure wireless carrier, before agreeing last month to sell out to Vodafone of Britain. And there is a nagging concern that corporate life on this side of the Atlantic is a million miles from the sort of environment he has spent the past 15 years creating at AirTouch.

If, at 62, Mr Ginn seems a little reluctant to hand over control, it is hardly surprising. A pioneer from the early days of the mobile telephone, he faced down considerable scepticism to get this far. And he clearly views AirTouch as the manifestation of his own theories about corporate behaviour.

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It was the chance to start a company from a blank sheet of paper that drew him into wireless telephony in the early 1980s, even more than the business opportunity that was opening up, Mr Ginn says. He describes himself as "someone who has been interested in management, in what it is that motivates people to perform".

All of this makes him part of a rare breed in US telephony. Like many others, he spent much of his career in the sprawling bureaucracy of the Bell system before the break-up of the old AT&T in 1984. But his slightly reserved demeanour and considered way of weighing questions before offering a response disguises an entrepreneurial drive and vision that few of his peers displayed.

All of this may explain why Mr Ginn now exhibits a healthy wariness about what he has just done. Merging two companies on different continents "is a real risk", he says.

Vodafone's $62 billion (€68 billion) offer has turned more AirTouch employees into millionaires than Mr Ginn can keep track of, and some of these may decide the time has come to move on, he says. AirTouch was an early exponent of motivating all employees with the chance to make big gains by holding the company's stock. "I don't think [this practice] is very common in the UK," says Mr Ginn, while Vodafone is itself only "just beginning".

Part of this seems to reflect the chasm in corporate governance that has traditionally existed between the two sides of the Atlantic.

As the chairman and chief executive of a large company, Mr Ginn says he has been concerned mainly with setting strategy. The practice here of a chief executive acting like a managing director is alien to him.

That makes the role of non-executive chairman - the position he will take in the new company - equally alien.

All of this helps to explain why a merger with Vodafone - long viewed in the industry as a strong likelihood - nearly didn't happen. Last summer, the two companies talked about a combination, but drifted apart after failing to agree on price and how to run the new group.

Mr Ginn says that having failed to pull off one of his two strategic objectives - going global - he then turned to his second: developing a national presence in the US. This brought the company close to a combination with Bell Atlantic, something he describes as a pure disposal of the company, rather than a merger, before Vodafone returned to the fray.

In the end, the British company came up with a much higher offer - not enough, apparently, to meet Mr Ginn's own view of his company's worth, but then he says that Mr Chris Gent, head of Vodafone, "probably isn't happy with how much he had to pay, either".

And Vodafone made enough concessions in how the new company would be run to convince Mr Ginn that his creation would not be wrecked. Board seats were split evenly between the two companies. "They said they understood the different philosophies on pay in the UK and the US," he says.

Certainly, Mr Ginn's own remuneration will seem foreign to many British shareholders. Selling AirTouch has brought him a considerable windfall: his stock and options are worth more than $220 million.

How does he justify such wealth? "The whole issue depends on where you are coming from philosophically," he says.

The level of pay is valid "if you have a vision, and can implement that vision and make shareholders wealthy", he says. "I have not had one complaint from a major shareholder."

Mr Ginn certainly draws admiration from peers for his successes at AirTouch. "He's done very well," says Mr Dan Hesse, head of AT&T's wireless business. "He had a view and he stuck to it."

Other early backers of wireless telephony have also made big fortunes, adds Mr David Roddy, telecom economist at Deloitte & Touche. "The people who have kept the vision alive have done very well out of it."

Indeed, it is only very recently that Mr Ginn's bet has paid off. After its stock-market listing in 1994, AirTouch's share price languished. At the time, the US company was busy buying up minority stakes in European wireless companies - investments that are now worth far more than its more developed domestic operations.

This was not a fashionable strategy at the time. "The [national] European carriers really didn't see it as their role to compete in someone else's market," he says. "They began to wake up in the mid-1990s." By then, companies like Vodafone and AirTouch had secured a continent-wide footprint.

Wall Street didn't wake up until very recently: two years ago, AirTouch's stock was worth less than a third of the final buy-out price. "American investors can be very American-centric," just as Europeans can be euro-centric, says Mr Ginn.

Concerned, he turned to two other San Francisco-based entrepreneurs on his board for advice about what to do about his lagging share price: Charles Schwab, chairman of the most successful discount stockbroker, and Don Fisher, who created Gap.

Their advice: don't be swayed by stock-market fashion. "They said keep creating value, and the market will take care of itself," says Mr Ginn. A big windfall for AirTouch's shareholders - including Mr Ginn himself - is the result.