TELECOM

Everyone said Africa was too poor for mobile phones. 100 million subscribers later, I think the market disagreed.

Skype carried 40% of international phone calls at its peak. We turned a $0 product into a $8.5 billion company. Free can be very expensive for incumbents.

I bought Telmex for $1.7 billion. People thought I was crazy. Now it is worth more than the GDP of most Central American countries.

We saw what mobile phones could do in Europe and the United States. We asked: why can't the same thing happen in Africa? Nobody had a good answer.

Fashion and telecom look very different, but they both run on network effects and brand loyalty.

We believed in Hong Kong's future as a global connectivity hub. That conviction hasn't changed.

Consolidation is inevitable. The question is whether you're the consolidator or the consolidated.

Fixed-mobile convergence is the name of the game in European telecoms. The companies that can offer both services will win.