Click & Close Ads
Click & Close Ads
High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. to buy additional rights.
The reason I love soccer is because it’s the only sport in the world where the underdog has a chance,” says Marcelo Claure. “If you look at the gross domestic product of England and Uruguay, England should kill them every time they play.”
He points to the performance of Club Bolívar, the Bolivian football team he owns, as proof. “Last year we made it to the semifinals of the equivalent of the [Uefa] Champions League in Latin America, and now we’re ranked as one of the top 50 clubs in the world.”
High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Em to buy additional rights.
Mr Claure must hope the same rule applies to the mobile phone industry: he was recently appointed by Masayoshi Son, the Japanese telecoms billionaire, to turn round Sprint, his struggling US mobile network.
Mr Claure first caught Mr Son’s eye when he was running Brightstar, a mobile phone distributor he founded and turned into the world’s largest.
The Japanese tycoon was so impressed with the Miami-based business that he bought a controlling stake for $1.26bn in 2013, a deal that made Mr Claure a paper billionaire. He is said to be the richest Hispanic person living in the US.
While running Brightstar, Mr Claure earned a sort of celebrity status, thanks in part to a performance from Jennifer Lopez at his 40th birthday party, and his friendship with David Beckham, with whom he is trying to launch a Major League Soccer team in Miami.
“It frustrated me that one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world didn’t have a soccer team. So that’s why I partnered with David. In the next 60 to 90 days we should be making an announcement that hopefully we will have a team in Miami.”
But why does a serial entrepreneur who hangs out with pop singers and football stars become “company man”, and move his family to Kansas City, a far less glamorous town than Miami? Why not set up a new business instead?Click & Close Ads
Click & Close Ads
When we meet at Sprint’s headquarters on the edge of the city, Mr Claure is clearly uncomfortable with the group’s grand campus, modelled after an Ivy League college. But he insists he is up for the corporate challenge.High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Emailadditional rights.
This could be a tremendous turnround success story, or it will just be the story of an entrepreneur who couldn’t do the same in corporate America.”
Mr Claure’s career as an entrepreneur started at the age of 18, when he used to fly back to Bolivia from Massachusetts for college vacations and to buy cans of food from his family’s factory. “Then, I used to borrow my mom’s car, go to the market, open the back of the car, and just sell a whole bunch of stuff.” His mother was a “bit embarrassed”, but he was hooked.
Click & Close Ads
Click & Close Ads
His next business, Best Travel Consultant, saw Mr Claure buying up frequent flyer miles from fellow students and selling them at a profit to those looking for cheap airfares home. “For a college student to be making a serious amount of money was great. I had employees. My senior year was quite fun.
High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our
His first “proper job” after college was with the Bolivian Football Federation, where he was part of the team that took Bolivia to the World Cup in 1994.
A few years later, he returned to Massachusetts and walked into a mobile phone store to buy a new handset. The owner, Enrique, was fed up, and looking for a way out. “He was quite upset that he was working late because his salespeople didn’t show up that day,” recalls Mr Claure.
“He asked me if I knew somebody that wanted to own a cellphone store. I said, ‘Sure, me’. I didn’t have much money so I bought it for almost close to nothing, and I paid him back with the profits.”
Mr Claure took a large stake in the single-store business and assumed day-to-day control, expanding it into a chain with multiple locations in New England.
He ended up selling his stake back to the owner at a considerable profit, following a disagreement over strategy. “He said, ‘I’m done. I’m 60. I have no interest in becoming the largest company in the world’. And I’d say, ‘no, we’ve got to grab all the money and reinvest’.”
After a short, ill-fated spell working for another large phone reseller — “I like to be my own boss, I lasted one year” — he moved to Miami in 1997 and set up Brightstar. “Granted, it might not be the most exciting industry, distribution, but we were able to create the number one company in the world.”
High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email to buy additional rights.
When Mr Son bought Sprint, the third-largest US network, he had intended to merge it with T-Mobile US, the number four, but regulators indicated they would block the transaction on competition grounds. After that plan failed, he appointed Mr Claure, already a director, as chief executive. He arrived last August to find a company in chaos.
In one of his first management meetings, he asked a senior vice-president why anybody would want to be a Sprint customer, “and I was not able to get a straight answer”. Little surprise then that in the 15 months before Mr Claure joined Sprint, it lost more than 2m contract customers.
“The situation was tougher than most people believed,” he says. “It took me a couple of days to realise that we needed to take really dramatic action. I would have liked to have had a little more time to understand, but I was forced to just jump in and get to war mode.”
He announced 4,000 job cuts, sacked the marketing agency and changed the group’s credit policies to stop it from signing up customers cut off by other networks for not paying their bills.
“Those were all decisions taken within the first 10 days. They could’ve been the right ones, they could’ve been the wrong ones, but I think we’ve turned the trajectory. By no means do I mean we’ve turned around this company, but we’ve gone from a steep decline to recovery phase.”
High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. to buy additional rights
Since he joined, the company has slowed the rate at which it is losing contract customers, but it has done so by waging a costly price war. Some analysts think it will run out of cash next year, though Mr Claure insists the turnround is possible.
He is attempting to revive the company amid a frenzy of dealmaking in the industry, with AT&T buying DirecTV for $48.5bn, while Charter Communications is acquiring Time Warner Cable for $56.7bn. Now Dish, one of the largest pay-TV groups in the US, is in talks to buy T-Mobile US. There is a danger that Sprint could end up being the last one without a partner.
Mr Claure might be enjoying his new role in Kansas City, but when I ask how his family are coping, he picks his words more carefully. “They’re adjusting. It’s a different life,” he says, before offering a more telling anecdote about the recent arrival of his baby daughter, born the Friday before we meet.
“As my wife was delivering, she looked at me and said, ‘did you ever think we were going to have a baby in Kansas City?’ I said, ‘No, life is full of surprises and you’ve got to take them as they come.Click & Close Ads
Click & Close Ads
Friday, June 12, 2015
