The board of Vodafone Group has chosen 29-year company veteran Margherita Della Valle to be its next CEO, defying speculation that the challenged telecommunications giant would, for the first time, pick someone from beyond its own corporate orbit.

She hasn’t always been a corporate insider. Della Valle rose through the ranks after being one of the first 30 or so employees at the Italian telecoms start-up Omnitel, where she helped decide the location of the company’s radio masts for its new mobile network, according to a colleague. Omnitel was acquired by Vodafone and, in 2001, became Vodafone Italy.

Yet over the years she’s become a Vodafone stalwart, holding the roles of Europe chief financial officer, group financial controller, deputy CFO and CFO, implementing cost-saving measures worth billions of euros, and overseeing the carve-out, listing and sale of the company’s mobile mast business, Vantage Towers.

“I know what needs to change, and we are getting on with it,” she asserted on a call in January after taking the reins from Nick Read, who was ousted in December without a replacement lined up. The word “interim” was dropped from her official title almost immediately.

Since January, Della Valle has cut hundreds of jobs in the company’s London headquarters, appointed a chief commercial officer and delegated commercial decision making to local units. While Vodafone searches for an external successor, Della Valle is still the telecoms company’s chief financial officer, and has appointed Vodacom director Anna Dimitrova as group financial controller.

At the Mobile World Congress in March, the industry get-together in Barcelona, Della Valle was seen meeting fellow telecoms executives and touring the Huawei Technologies stand. As insiders gossiped about the Vodafone succession over coffees and tapas, she was spoken of highly by more than one rival.

First woman

Della Valle’s appointment makes her the first woman to lead Vodafone, which as of last year had a 60% male workforce. She is now also one of only a handful of female CEOs in the FTSE 100 Index of Britain’s largest companies.

Born in Rome, Della Valle speaks French, Italian and English, and received her master’s degree in economics from Bocconi University, an elite private university in Milan whose other alumni include former Prime Minister Mario Monti, economist Nouriel Roubini, Juventus FC chair Andrea Agnelli, the newly-appointed CEO of Cellnex Telecom Marco Patuano, and the CEO of EssilorLuxottica Francesco Milleri.

She recently joined the university’s board, which has reunited her professionally with Italy’s former digital minister, Vittorio Colao, who also ran Vodafone from 2008 to 2018. A self-confessed “fan” of Della Valle, both he and the new CEO worked at Vodafone with Paolo Bertoluzzo, now CEO of payment processor Nexi.

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A keen reader, Della Valle has told friends that she’s been inspired by the polar exploration of legendary explorer Ernest Shackleton, who rescued his trapped team during a near-disastrous voyage in Antarctica. While her circumstances are slightly less arduous, with a raft of complex deals and potential shareholder activism to contend with in coming months, his leadership and resilience may be a helpful inspiration.

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“The announcement of a permanent CEO should help free up Vodafone to push ahead with a number of strategic initiatives that seem to be in limbo,” New Street Research analyst James Ratzer said in a note on Thursday, remarking on the company’s string of reported but uncompleted deals. “However, at the same time, we believe a lot of people could see this as a missed opportunity to drive change. Vodafone’s business has recently begun to underperform the peers across the board.” — (c) 2023 Bloomberg LP