ARUN SARIN, FORMER CHIEF operating officer of AirTouch and chief executive of private equity firm Accel-KKR Telecom, has been selected to succeed Sir Christopher Gent as chief executive officer of Vodafone.

The 1954-born Sarin studied engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, earning his masters degrees in engineering and business administration at the University of California, Berkeley. He started his career in the wireless industry at Pacific Telesis Group in the early 1980s. Former colleagues described the 48-year-old ex-boss of U.S. mobile group AirTouch as “highly intellectual and occasionally abrasive,” while Vodafone's chairman Lord MacLaurin called him “an extremely good strategic thinker.”

Sarin was closely involved in Vodafone’s 1999 acquisition of AirTouch. He was then appointed Chief Executive of the Americas and Asia Region at Vodafone, before leaving to become CEO of internet startup, InfoSpace. He remained a non-executive director of Vodafone during his disappointing tenure at InfoSpace and his subsequent stint at Accel-KKR.