Billionaire O’Brien Chasing Carlos Slim Sells Mobiles to Masses

Hiking along the Kokoda Trail in remote eastern Papua New Guinea last summer, Denis O’Brien discovered he didn’t have a mobile phone signal. The sturdily built Irish telecommunications tycoon knew how to fix that. He stormed into the local office of Digicel Group Ltd., the wireless operator he’d founded in 2001, and demanded that extra phone towers be erected along the route.

The new masts will add to a network O’Brien’s company began building in 2006, the same year the United Nations classified the South Pacific nation as one of the world’s least developed, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its December issue. It was good timing, albeit in a rough neighborhood.