Philipp Humm, who resigned from his
position as CEO of T-Mobile, the carrier announced June 27, is
joining Vodafone, a European rival of T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom.

Vodafone has split its chief executive
position for the overseeing of Europe, and Humm will become chief executive of
Vodafone’s Northern and Central Europe business—which includes the U.K. and
Germany—while Paolo Bertoluzzo, currently CEO of Vodafone Italy, will run
Vodafone businesses in Southern Europe.

“Looks like he got a better offer,” Gartner
analyst Phillip Redman told eWEEK, adding that Humm faced a considerable
workload at T-Mobile, now left for his yet-to-be-determined successor.

“[T-Mobile] is struggling to define itself,
is behind on LTE [Long-Term Evolution] launches and needs to improve its
metrics,” said Redman. “A big task for anyone.”

At Vodafone, which owns 45 percent of Verizon
Wireless, Humm will also need to roll up his sleeves. The European debt crisis
has hurt the company’s growth and service revenues, though its fourth-quarter
earnings, reported May 22, exceeded forecasts.

“Our focus on the key growth areas of data,
emerging markets and enterprise is positioning us well in a difficult
macroeconomic environment,” Vittorio Colao, Vodafone’s group chief executive
said in a May 22 statement.

“Our goal over the next three years,” Colao
added, “is to continue to strengthen our technology and commercial platforms through
reliable and secure high-speed data networks, significantly enhanced customer
service across all channels, and improved data pricing models, to enrich
customers’ experience and maximize our share of value in the markets in which
we operate.”

The division of the carrier’s European
territories to Humm and Bertoluzzo, say analysts, allows Vodafone to groom two
potential replacements for Colao.

Humm will begin his new position Oct. 1.
Luckily for him, he has been given “all the good stuff, the growing stuff,”
Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Robin Bienenstock told Bloomberg News, “while the Southern
economies are seriously afflicted.”

The
Wall Street Journal reported June
27 that Humm had planned to leave T-Mobile in September, to return to his
family, who had remained in Europe when he took the T-Mobile position in
November 2010. The Journal
added that before being sent to lead T-Mobile USA, Humm was responsible for
Deutsche Telekom’s mobile business in Germany, though stepped down from that
position in November 2008, after taking responsibility for a data breach in
which 17 million T-Mobile customers’ data was stolen.

Humm leaves behind a T-Mobile not only
searching for a new head executive—Deutsche Telekom head Rene Oberman said he
has spoken with a number of “promising candidates”—but in the initial stages of
an LTE rollout that it’s hoped will reverse its fortunes.

After AT&T backed
away from its proposal to buy T-Mobile in late 2011, the smaller carrier
received a compensation package that included approximately $4 billion and some
wireless spectrum, which it has invested in a “network modernization” strategy
that Humm announced Feb. 23.

Humm recently also negotiated
a deal with Verizon Wireless to both buy some Advanced Wireless Services spectrum
from Verizon and exchange some AWS spectrum licenses with it. Some of the
spectrum that Verizon plans to unload is spectrum it will receive through its
controversial deal with several U.S. cable companies.

Humm said in a June 25 statement that
T-Mobile expects the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to approve the
transaction in time for T-Mobile to incorporate the spectrum into its LTE
rollout in 2013.

He added, “This is good for T-Mobile and good
for consumers because it will enable T-Mobile to compete even more vigorously
with other wireless carriers.”

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