As Orange chief executive Hans Snook stood before the world's media last week, there was a discernible twinkle in his eye. Who can blame him? The man who used GBP700 million (about HK$9.02 billion) from Hutchison Whampoa in 1993 to build a nationwide mobile network in Britain, and one of the strongest brand names in the cellular industry, has created in five short years a company capitalised at almost GBP17 billion. The friendly takeover of Orange - with Hutchison's blessing - by the German industrial group Mannesmann not only ensures that he will personally receive, in short order, a bumper cash payment, but the GBP19.8 billion price tag that Mannesmann is forking out is a rewarding recognition of how a man on a backpacking trip has revolutionised the mobile phone industry. 'I think it is an excellent opportunity,' he said of the Mannesmann deal last week. 'This offer is a valuable opportunity for Orange, and it's an excellent opportunity for the shareholders.' Like many business visionaries, the roots of his success are found in a mixture of his past experiences, and just plain common sense. Born in Germany in 1948 in Dissen, his family emigrated to Canada, where he spent most of his life, becoming a hotelier at the Westin International group. It was there that he learned about the priceless business advantage to be gained by service. When he decided to pack it all in, and go on a backpacking holiday around Asia with his wife, he took the service ethic with him, and unexpectedly found himself using it quite quickly when he was persuaded to give up his travels and take on a consultancy role at a small Hong Kong communications and paging firm Young Generation Group. When that was eventually bought out by Hutchison, Mr Snook found himself in the midst of the Hutchison empire and being encouraged to put new ideas into Hutchison's burgeoning mobile communications business. With Mr Li's keen eye for talent, he spotted Mr Snook, and elected to send him to Britain, and sort out the embarrassing mess that Rabbit was rapidly becoming. Mr Snook's first move was to start instilling his quest for improved service. In the early days of mobile telephony, customers and products were regarded simply as commodities, Mr Snook thought this simply insulted them. By providing optimal customer service, which included guaranteed connections on day of purchase of a mobile phone and studiously cutting out intermediaries, Orange uniquely among Britain's three other mobile phone companies, not only controlled the service it gave to customers but built up a customer database that it could then nurture and keep in contact with as the company developed. Mr Snook's plan was to keep showing his customers that they owned more than just a means of communication, but had bought into a concept that offered them a branded lifestyle. Rather like well-known hotel chains that seek to differentiate their hotel experience from the experience of the mainstream, Mr Snook sought to create an image for Orange that would make it an indispensable accessory for the future. Hence the company's slogan: 'The Future's Bright, the Future's Orange.' This service ethic as a consequence naturally extended to an unremitting desire, driven by Mr Snook personally, to always ensure that Orange remained at the forefront of every innovation in the mobile industry. This meant building up a network that was not only larger than everybody else's in Britain, but also wider and more sophisticated so that it could handle the greater demands as voice communications were replaced by data. As Orange was due to be launched, One2One, the British mobile phone service recently sold to Deutsche Telekom, was throwing down the gauntlet, saying that it would provide free calls to all its customers at off-peak times. The idea was revolutionary, but fatally flawed, because it meant that One2One was constantly paying out, with the prospect of receiving no income. One2One was also making the big mistake of limiting its coverage to just the London and outer London area. Mr Snook said what customers wanted was not free calls, but coverage. Of course it has not always been plain sailing for Mr Snook. His arrival in Britain at the height of the Rabbit disaster was particularly inopportune. Rabbit was Hutchison's attempt to sell a mobile that could place calls, but not receive them, and could only work if the receiver were stationary and within reach of a base station. It was destined to fail, and it did - dramatically. As a consequence, very few people believed that Hutchison could pull off a fully-fledged mobile service, which seemed to have a ridiculous name and an unknown management team. Mr Snook and other Orange executives also did not make life easy for themselves by refusing to meet with the media or analysts, bringing with them the old Hong Kong - and particularly Hutchison - ethic of maintaining only a minimal public profile. Another big blunder was the late recognition of the importance of providing roaming facilities for its travelling customer base, a problem that was quickly rectified, and is now widely accepted as a key to the vision of a wirefree future. The deal with Mannesmann means that Mr Snook goes home with a package worth GBP45 million, comprising GBP15 million in cash, and GBP30 million in performance related payments - not bad for a backpacker delayed on his travels. Sheel Kohli in London