“It was not a negotiating ploy or tool at all”

Last Friday, the GSMA announced that it had selected Barcelona as Mobile World Capital up to 2018. Today, the City of Barcelona is holding a press conference to outline its vision of the Capital, and its programme and activities.

But how and why did the GSMA choose Barcelona as its host city for Mobile World Capital? Was it always a done deal or was there genuine competition? Will the process lead to savings for exhibitors and participants? And has the GSMA been promised any action on bag snatchers?

Keith Dyer asked John Hoffman, CEO of GSMA Ltd, all these questions, and a few more.

KEITH DYER:
What was the process, what were the criteria, how were they judged?

JOHN HOFFMAN:
Keith, if I told you that I’d have to kill you.

Actually we’re not er…we made the decision early on in the process, which was about 18-20 months ago, that we would not talk about the process or the criteria. Even the cities don’t know how we scored it.

It’s a combination of many factors: what we did is we looked at the Mobile World Congress as the cornerstone of Mobile World Capital, and took into account all the attributes that we deem important to conduct a successful Congress. Then we’ve got the Capital components — the vision, the innovation, ideas that the various candidates put forward for the Capital. We gave them some ideas such as the Centre and the Festival and we left it up to them how they wanted to personalise their ideas to make it unique for each of the candidate cities. So they were massively different: what Paris thought and Milan thought were similar but different, and vice versa for all the other candidates as well.

And then we looked at risks from the standpoint of holding the Congress, as well as the Capital, of each of the locations — assessing the relative risk compared to each other. And then we looked at what some of the economic differences might be to go to various cities from an attendee, participant and exhibitor standpoint.

I don’t know how many attributes we actually scored, what we tried to do was take a very quantitative and qualitative process, and try and take out any biases, and make it as fair and transparent as possible. And I think that from the reaction of our board and the people we presented it to, they believed that we did that and then endorsed Barcelona as Mobile World Capital.

So the cities themselves weren’t bidding against a defined set of criteria? You were leaving it up to them to make their own presentation?

Well, no. In some areas we were very, very specific: how many taxis were available, how many flights you have going in and out and where to and so on. So there were some very definitive criteria. And then others were more open-ended: so describe how you’d implement a festival around mobility, what would it be, when would it be, all that sort of stuff.

Who was making the assessment?

We had a team [formed of] a couple of levels at the GSMA, all internal. So we had a core team and then we had some experts, especially around the Congress component we had a lot of expertise internally that we were able to utilise. And then some business folks and others that made up our core team looked at all the components and put them together.

What about the members, the operator members, were they involved?

Yes, but in a cursory way in that they weren’t part of the decision making process. Ultimately, we presented our recommendation to them and they accepted it. But they were not actively involved on our side. They were actually actively involved on the candidate city side. You can imagine that there was a lot of fierce loyalty for some of the operators in some of these countries to support their candidates.

You said in the press release it was a close decision, was that just you being polite or was it quite a difficult decision?

No it was a difficult decision, there’s no doubt. As I told our board — we had four locations, proposals, candidate cities all of which were qualified, there were no losers. it was the best of the best. No-one was perfect but none of them were any concern for the execution for the Mobile World Capital concept or support for holding the Congress.

Do you think that the best city for the Capital concept may not have been the best for the Congress, and vice versa? It occurs to me, for example, that Paris could possibly be very good as a Capital, but less suited to holding the Congress.

We decided a long time ago that there could only be one Mobile World Congress. Today it’s in Europe. As we looked at the regions Asia actually has more people involved in mobility than Europe, but we have felt very strongly that Europe is still the home of the industry. The cornerstone of the Mobile World Capital is the Congress, but although we talked about separating it we felt that the risk was too great for the success of the Capital to bifurcate it from the Congress. We ultimately felt that some combination of the two was our best way forward.

Is there an extra year on this? I seem to remember the term being announced as up to 2017 originally.

You know it probably isn’t public knowledge but when we originally started out it was three years, then as we kicked it around some more we said that’s probably not enough time so we picked a number out of the air and said five. Then it was the actual candidates themselves who came back and said could we make it six, and we agreed to let them either propose five or six years – and we had some of both.

I think their view was that if we do this right it has such an economic and geo-political impact that we want to make it as long as possible.

Do the bidding city pay you any money? Is there a bid from them on an economic basis, do they talk to you about the price of the Fira, for example, as part of the bid?

Of course it was an all-inclusive proposal. We negotiated formal contracts with each of the bids on everything from the price of advertising outside to the cost of the venue for the Congress to the price of food that would be served.

So is the Barcelona re-bid cheaper for you on some of those elements?

When we move in 2013 from Montjuic to their other facility on Gran Via, which is a state of the art facility, it is going to be less expensive for us because we don’t have to build all of the tent structures. It’s bigger, so we can actually move everyone inside, so it does cost us a bit less as we don’t have to build as many facilities.

Does that go back to exhibitors, then – are you going to charge less?
You know that’s one of the things that we’re going to talk about. We haven’t actually talked about what we’re going to do in 2013 just yet.

On the City, the Mobile World Capital stuff, I see there’s talk of a Festival and a Centre. Did I get the wrong idea, I thought there was a wider element of turning the city itself into a mobile exemplar – using transport or retail as an example for mobile services?

You’re exactly correct. That’s what we’re embracing. I think you’re going to see Barcelona work aggressively to move in areas of mobile government, health initiatives, all kinds of unique services around mobility. We will help them. That’s one of our commitments — that we as the GSMA, as well as our member companies, would help them trial, innovate and then export to other areas these new ideas.

Are there any specifics from the bid as to what these might look like, or the Festival or the Centre?

We will probably let Barcelona take the lead on that. They will outline some of their visions and then frankly some of this stuff has to be fleshed out, we have a lot of time to implement this. We’ll toss up some ideas, they’ll toss up some ideas, and we’ll jointly figure out how to move forward.

Did you seek any assurances from them around safety and security of your attendees?

We view those issues as very critical to the success of the Mobile World Congress, yes. Absolutely.

So was there any comeback from them, then, as to what they can do?

Yes, they will continue to enhance their levels of security and services that our attendees receive when they come to Barcelona. I’ve heard that Mayor Trias is working very extensively not just around MWC but he is viewing security and some of the petty street crime as an issue that needs to be addressed for Barcelona as a whole.

I suppose the other gossipy thing that people raise, as well as security, is that this was always staying in Barcelona, and it was really just a kind of bargaining process for you guys.

You’re the first one to actually ask me that question. If you ask the Barcelona people whether it was a slam dunk I’ll think they’ll tell you that it absolutely was not, and I was very comfortable in selecting any of the four candidates that we had. It was not a negotiating ploy or tool at all. We had good relationships with Barcelona, so could we have negotiated contracts with them? Yes, absolutely, we could have done that. But if you think back to our plan to reduce our list of six to three, they were so good we actually settled on four, even though it meant reviewing four different proposal, going into detailed discussions with four cities instead of three. Barcelona was just the best of the best.

Were there any ideas that were in the other bids but not in Barcelona’s that you would  look to share with Barcelona so you can have the best possible Capital elements?

One of things I put into our criteria was that when someone made a proposal or idea to us then we owned that idea from a legal standpoint. So yes we could potentially share ideas from other places.

So, it’s 2013 and we’re coming up to Congress. What will be in Barcelona by then, do you think, or is it too early to say?

We’ll have implemented the Capital concept very much, we’ll have our Centre up and running, the Festival will already be in place in at least one form. One of the opportunities Barca had was because they were already going to hold 2012 MWC they kind of get a head start on everyone else so we are going to see things sooner rather than later in Barcelona.

And just in terms of the benefits to the industry and your members of having this concept, what do you think they are?

Well I think it is an advanced platform for innovation. The ability to work in a  focused area that we can then export to other cities, regions and countries around the world is probably our biggest benefit.