Businesses I really admire

Martin Vander Weyer

This month, Spectator Business editor Martin Vander Weyer offers his own selection of companies he respects for their service quality and entrepreneurial spirit

Martin Vander Weyer is editor of Spectator Business and business editor of The Spectator. He is also a regular contributor to the Daily and Sunday Telegraph. Before becoming a journalist, he spent 15 years as a banker in London, Brussels and the Far East

Vodafone
I’ve never been a Vodafone customer (I’m an Orange man) and I’ve often been irritated by its ads, particularly that long-running ‘How are you?’ campaign, at which I used to shout a variety of unpleasant replies. But the death in February of Vodafone founder chairman Sir Ernie Harrison cannot pass without a salute from everyone who admires big, serious, technology-driven, bet-the-farm entrepreneurship. In the 1960s and 1970s, Harrison built a world-class defence electronics group, Racal, and in 1982, with his colleague Gerry Whent, he went on to launch an audacious bid for the first British mobile telephony licence to compete against British Telecom. Prospects were uncertain, and the investment required was massive. But the Racal venture captured more than half of the mobile market in its early years, and in due course, renamed Vodafone, it became a giant public company in its own right. Harrison himself was a charismatic, poker-playing, racehorse-owning, work-hard-play-hard business leader – completely free of PR puffery – who cared deeply about his workforce and generated remarkable returns for his loyal investors. We need more like him today.

Sony
When I went to work in Tokyo in 1985, I bought an elegant little Sony radio, which has been beside my bed ever since and still works perfectly. I also rented a flat which was a short walk from the modest hilltop home of Akio Morita, Sony’s co-founder and one of the few business leaders who ever broke the conventions of Japanese corporate anonymity to become internationally famed in his own right. I never met him (he died in 1997) but I wish I had – because the story of Sony is another parable of great entrepreneurship against the odds. Morita and his friend Masaru Ibuka started making crude tape-recorders in a tiny workshop in a bombed-out suburb of Tokyo in 1946; they went on to perfect the transistor radio, the Walkman and many other gadgets that have been part of our lives over the past half-century. Morita was proud to have helped change the image of ‘Made in Japan’ from ‘something shoddy to something fine’: despite the economic problems of Japan today, its manufactured products still set world standards of quality and reliability. Faced with a superstore full of competing and confusing consumer-electronics brands, I think of my perfect radio and my former neighbour – and look for the Sony logo.

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