Mr Robert G. Conway
Chief Executive and Member of the Board
GSM Association
Rob Conway is the CEO and board member of the GSMA which has grown to
become the mobile industry’s leading global institution for strategic planning and
engagement, next generation key enablers and their commercial implementation,
and public policy development and engagement with the broader eco-system of
stakeholders such as government policy makers, consumers, suppliers, the
media and others. Rob was named by Global Telecoms in the top 10 of the most
influential leaders in telecoms. Fierce Wireless named him to the top 20 on their
list.
He was instrumental with then Chairman Craig Ehrlich in re-engineering and reenergizing GSMA from a quasi-standards body into the industry’s leading global
institution critically focused on the imperatives for a healthy industry eco-system.
Those efforts led to the creation of the current GSMA board of largely CEOs from
across its leading members thereby ensuring tremendous leadership and a
cutting edge view which is complemented by constant engagement with leading
suppliers in the telecom eco-system, government leaders and others. Our
Leadership Summits are precisely geared to enrich this engagement. To
complement the board’s leadership and ensure the most robust consideration of
the industry’s developments, he ensured that group level chief strategy officers
and chief regulatory officers were added to the GSMA to complement its existing
group of senior technical executives.
Mr. Conway is keen that GSMA work deeply in partnership with those in the
industry’s eco-system to ensure the best possible engagement and solutions.
While suppliers are critical to a healthy eco-system so are governments and not
surprisingly GSMA has stepped up its global engagement with governments and
their policy makers. This has led to our Government Summit programs and other
platforms for engagement as well as our support for numerous industryGovernment forums including those led by the UN’s ITU. The GSMA now
engages with leading institutions across the globe from the UN’s ITU, the World
Bank, IFC, World Economic Forum and Gates Foundation to the G20 where
GSMA is leading an effort to promote broadband as the global accelerator for
economic recovery. Mr. Conway firmly believes in the importance of these
relationships with leading global institutions as well as with key government
Ministers and devotes considerable time to those relationships.
From this unique vantage point and executive level collaboration has emerged
leading global initiatives such as the Emerging Market Handset Program, 3G For
All, Mobile Money (including Mobile Money Transfer and Pay-By-Mobile using
NFC), Universal Charging Solution, Embedded Mobile, Green Power for Mobile,
Mobile Audience Measurement and Mobile Broadband Campaign, Rich
Communication Suite, among many others. To identify and recognize the
leading innovators in the mobile space, GSMA established the “Mobile Innovation
Program” which is an innovative mechanism by which mobile innovators of any
type or size can interact and become known to venture capital and private equity
groups, operators, suppliers and others.
GSMA has taken leadership to protect children from those who might exploit
them by using mobile phones and established the Mobile Alliance for this
purpose. To address the needs of those at the bottom of the economic pyramid
and promote the green agenda, Mr. Conway was instrumental in establishing the
GSMA’s Development Fund which was recently awarded more than $12 million
in funding from the Gates Foundation for its cutting edge efforts in the area of
mobile money for the unbanked (the MMU program). Its Green Power for Mobile
program is leading on the use of energy efficient base stations as well as solar
and wind power to reduce carbon footprints while enabling connectivity to mobile
for those at the bottom of the pyramid. The Development Fund is working on
mobile health and other innovative ways to provide service via mobile to those
less fortunate.
Mr. Conway was instrumental with then Chairman Ehrlich in acquiring the
conference business from Informa and growing it into the industry’s showcase
venues with the Mobile World Congress and Mobile Asia Congress. He led the
formation of a subsidiary group within GSMA called GSMC to manage the
growing range of commercial services which GSMA provides to the industry like
conferences, Wireless Intelligence (a leading information service), Show Daily (a
leading conference publication), PathFinder (global enum service) and others.
This has allowed GSMA to become financially more self-sufficient and therefore
more proactive in addressing the needs of our greater community through such
vehicles as the Development Fund. He has grown revenues more than 10 fold
and added top executive talent to enable GSMA’s further growth and
performance.
In addition to his membership on the GSMA board, Mr. Conway is a member of
the ITU Board and the Carmel Advisory Board. He has participated in numerous
industry and governmental panels and workshops in India, China, Singapore,
Brazil, US and elsewhere. He is a noted industry speaker who has spoken at
many industry events. He was an executive at Motorola, first in its handset group
and then as board member on several of their key subsidiaries as well as serving
as a CEO. He was instrumental in the 1990s introducing the first GSM
deployment in Latin America through his leadership on the mobile operator in
Chile. He was instrumental in the partnership which led to the creation of
operator Mobinil in Egypt. He led Motorola’s efforts in establishing a mobile
operator in Brazil and helped sustain Motorola’s mobile operations in Mexico and
across the rest of Latin America as well as engagements in Thailand, Vietnam
and elsewhere.