Vodafone
More info
- Released
- 1985 (as Racal-Vodafone)
- Type
- Telecom carrier
- Website
- vodafone.com
British mobile operator that started as a subsidiary of a defence electronics firm and grew into one of the world's largest.
The name is a contraction of voice, data and fone. Racal Telecom switched on its UK mobile network on New Year's Day 1985, and it was spun off as Vodafone in 1991. The world's first SMS — "Merry Christmas" — went over Vodafone's GSM network in December 1992.
In 2000 it completed the hostile takeover of Germany's Mannesmann for around $180 billion, still one of the largest corporate deals ever. More lasting was M-Pesa, the mobile money service its affiliate Safaricom launched in Kenya in 2007, which turned a phone number into a bank account for millions of people without one.