Easy hasn't been everything for British entrepreneur Stelios Haji-Ioannou, whose budget-priced ventures -- led by no-frills airline easyJet -- have run into some turbulence of late.
This past week Stelios -- as he's happy to be known -- revealed his latest project: easyMobile, a European cellphone service that he says will "make mobile telephony affordable to everybody."
PHOTO: EPA
The affable 37-year-old Cypriot-born businessman's plan is simple -- offer low costs through the Internet, create demand, and generate mass sales to compensate for the discounted charges.
EasyMobile intends to sell SIM (subscriber identity module) cards, the heart of any GSM-standard cellphone, on the web at prices that should be too cheap for competitors to match.
Stelios cannot disclose all the details, however, as easyMobile has yet to be allied with a mobile network operator, a necessary condition before the planned launch can go ahead later this year.
Talks with various network operators were ongoing, although potential partners are pretty much limited to two -- Britain's Vodafone and French operator Orange.
Negotiations with the latter have been complicated somewhat by the colour orange -- key to both companies' corporate image.
"We have received some threats from Orange that they will try to stop us from using the colour orange," Stelios said.
If talks with Orange fail to bear fruit, easyMobile would have to turn to Vodafone Group -- not necessarily the best way of obtaining a good deal, given Vodafone's clout as the world's biggest wireless telecoms operator.
In pressing ahead with easyMobile, Stelios is drawing on lessons he learned from the swift success of his best-known venture, easyJet, in which he still has a 41 percent stake.
He has allied himself with the Danish telecom group TDC, which will run easyMobile on a daily basis, leaving Stelios to take care of marketing and advertising.
This should help to reduce financial risk at a time when his other ventures have been going through hard times.
The easyEverything Internet cafes, launched in 1998, for instance, are still losing money -- after shedding 19 million euros in 2002 -- while car rental outfit easyCar lost 17.5 million euros in 2002.
As a result, the spoils which Stelios has accumulated thanks to the stock-market flotation of easyJet, and the periodic sale of its shares, are starting to dwindle.
Born into a Greek shipowning family, Stelios followed in his father's footsteps by setting up a shipping firm, Stelmar Tankers, in 1992, which he later sold to fund his fledging companies.
Stelios, who still owns 27 percent of Athens-based Stelmar, believed he had hit the jackpot when a US tanker company, OMI Corp, came forth with a takeover bid of US$600 million for the 41-vessel fleet. But the bid was rejected by the Stelmar board to the dismay of the Haji-Ioannou family -- a slight setback for Stelios, who states on his easyGroup's Web site that his mission is to "paint the world orange."
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