Chris Bannister’s fledgling Colombian mobile business has no profits, no revenue and no customers.
What the company does have is lawsuits to fend off. Scores of them, penned by the lawyers of some of the giants of the mobile industry, like billionaire Carlos Slim’s America Movil SAB and Spain’s Telefonica SA. What they all seek, in one fashion or another, is to block Bannister’s company, Wom, from ever signing up a single subscriber.
Why all the fuss about some little startup run by a foreigner who barely speaks a word of Spanish? Because Bannister, a 61-year-old Brit with a flair for the outlandish, has made a career of showing up in far-flung places and using over-the-top publicity campaigns to quickly grab market share from the entrenched mobile carriers. He did it in Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Poland, Nigeria, Sweden and, most recently, Chile.
It was that last one that really caused alarm in C-suites across Bogota.
There, with the backing of the same man who’s seeding the Colombian venture—the Icelandic entrepreneur Thor Bjorgolfsson—Bannister carved out a 20% market share for Wom in a span of just five years. A chunk of that business was taken from the Chilean units of America Movil and Telefonica.
And Colombia appears ripe for disruption. The subsidiaries of those two companies dominate the market, where mobile carriers on average charge customers $3.46 per gigabyte of data, one of the most expensive rates in the region. Bannister says he can easily beat that price.
“All I have to be is a bit better, a bit cheaper and create a brand that people love, and I’ll get 25% of market share, minimum,” Bannister said in a recent interview from the company’s Bogota headquarters. “It’s that simple.”
Wom’s building overlooks a busy highway in a mid-tier office district in the city’s north and sports a fifth-floor conference room decked out in the company’s signature purple hue. Bannister, dressed in a tight white t-shirt that showed off his tattoos, said Wom—and its employees, whom he calls “Wommers”—is well on the path to shaking up Colombia’s mobile market.
“Yeah, it’s taken longer here than in my other countries,” he said. “But we, as Wommers, are committed to create a success and to change the rules of Colombian telecom.”
Bannister has the support of deep-pocketed owners to do just that, with Bjorgolfsson’s Novator Partners LLP pledging $1 billion to build out the business over the next five years. There’s room for growth, with millions of people still lacking broadband mobile coverage.
All of this has put Wom on a “collision course” with the market leader, America Movil’s Claro, especially in rural areas where the incumbent spent heavily on infrastructure, said Wally Swain, a Bogota-based Latin America telecommunications analyst at Omdia, a research company.