Press Releases

António Coimbra, CEO of Vodafone Portugal, has accepted an invitation to become CEO of Vodafone Spain from 1 September. He will continue, however, as a non-executive member of the Board of Directors of Vodafone Portugal. He will be succeeded in his current role at Vodafone Portugal by Mário Vaz, currently Director for the Consumer Business Unit.

The new CEO of Vodafone Spain has been a member of the Board of Directors of Vodafone Portugal since 1995 and CEO since September 2009, when he succeeded the present Chairman of the Company, António Carrapatoso.

In almost three years under his leadership, Vodafone Portugal has achieved remarkable successes and, despite the economic crisis that the country has been suffering, achieved all the strategic and operational objectives set for the 2011/12 financial year.

The financial results and competitive performance of the Company have been outstanding: Vodafone has established itself even more firmly as a global telecommunications operator, both in the corporate segment and in the consumer segment in the fibre coverage areas; in the last quarter of the year it achieved a market share of approximately 40%, giving it co-leadership of the mobile telecommunications sector, and further strengthened its clear leadership position in the customer satisfaction index as shown by independent market surveys. For these reasons, it is increasingly and without doubt the most admired company in the telecommunications sector and one of the most admired in Portugal.

These results were only possible – stresses António Coimbra – because he has led “a highly competent, committed team with remarkable sense of pride in and belonging to the Company”. This means that the new CEO of Vodafone Spain leaves behind a solid, well-structured and competitive company, a leader in its market, which will certainly continue to maintain its high standards of performance and contribute decisively to the development of the telecommunications sector, the market and the country.

António Coimbra, 51, graduated in Mechanical Engineering from Lisbon Higher Technical Institute. He complemented his academic and professional training with seminars and postgraduate courses in various areas of knowledge in Portugal and abroad.

He began his career at Siemens in 1987. He joined Telecel – later to become Vodafone – in September 1992 as Director of Direct Sales. He has held various roles and positions within the Company. In 1994 he became Director of Marketing and in May 1995 joined the Board of Directors as Vice-President responsible for Marketing and Customer Support and later for Marketing, Sales and Operations. He took over as CEO of Vodafone Portugal in September 2009.

During his career with the Vodafone Group, António Coimbra has held positions of great importance, including as a member of the Group’s Marketing Board between 2000 and 2009, and Chief Marketing Officer of Vodafone Japan in 2004. He was president of Apritel (Association of Telecommunications Operators) from 2005 to 2007.

António Coimbra leaves Vodafone Portugal “with a sense of mission completed, confident both about the Company’s position and capacity for development and about the difficult but exciting challenge of leading Vodafone Spain”. Despite the economic and financial difficulties also in Portugal’s neighbour, the new CEO knows that at Vodafone Spain he will have a team of first-class professionals to surmount the difficulties and achieve the Company’s objectives.