Chris Gent is running the world's fourth most valuable company but he didn't know it. When the chief executive of Vodafone AirTouch is told that the £175 billion sterling (€285 billion) takeover of Mannesmann gives the company a market value which is only exceeded by the likes of Microsoft, Cisco and General Electric, he seems genuinely surprised.

He is not alone. Vodafone's growth from its origins as a fledgling start-up buried within the Racal Electronics empire in the mid-1980s is a success story that few can match. The dominant position it has now achieved if the deal goes ahead will give the combined entity access to approximately 42 million customers around the world. This is on a scale few people could have foreseen even a few years ago.

Indeed, Mr Gent owes his current position to a frantic year of corporate activity in which he has pulled off three of the largest deals ever attempted in the telecommunications industry, each one bigger than the last.

Sitting in a small room in Vodafone's frugal headquarters in Newbury, west of London, Mr Gent is in good shape for someone who has spent the past twoand-a-half months rushing across Europe and the US attempting to persuade Mannesmann shareholders of the merits of Vodafone's offer. Dressed in his trademark pinstripe suit, blue shirt and braces, the dark rings under his eyes are the only sign of the frantic schedule he has been keeping.

He also seems unimpressed by the scale of what he has achieved. By succeeding in a hostile takeover of one of Germany's best-known companies, he is perceived to have opened the floodgates for the restructuring of corporate Germany.

Along the way, his offer has also prompted a fundamental re-rating of the European telecom sector.

"These are byproducts of the deal," he says. "We decided to do this deal because it made sense, because it was so compelling in strategic and logical terms."

It might all have ended very differently.

Over the past 14 months, Mr Gent nearly allowed himself to get outflanked by both Bell Atlantic, the US local telecommunications company, and by Mannesmann.

He was, famously, at a cricket match in Australia when news came through that Bell Atlantic was close to a deal to buy AirTouch, the US wireless company he had long coveted.

Last year, he was caught out again when Mannesmann, a company he had also long seen as a partner and eventual merger candidate, launched an attack on Vodafone's home market with the purchase of wireless carrier, Orange.

At the time, the Vodafone boss was busy sorting out his position in the US and effectively failed to see the threat in his own backyard.

But Mr Gent eventually turned the tide with three of the biggest corporate deals ever done: snatching AirTouch from under Bell Atlantic's nose, then forging a joint venture between his former adversary and AirTouch's US operations and finally buying Mannesmann.

At 51, Mr Gent is an unlikely mogul. He is an archetypal British gentleman: polite with a good sense of humour, but not terribly flamboyant.

He loves cricket, and follows the English team around the world on their winter tours. He counts John Major, the former prime minister who is famed for being ordinary, among his friends.

Asked what lies at the heart of Mr Gent's success, Mr Arun Sarin, former chief executive of AirTouch, does not hesitate: "His timing is impeccable."

Faced with mergers between rival companies that could block Vodafone's path to leadership in the mobile communications industry, Mr Gent did not waste a moment before launching his own counter-attacks.

His cause was also helped by an accident of stock market history. The British company's shares soared as enthusiasm for wireless stocks took hold in London at a time when both AirTouch and Mannesmann were only beginning to win a strong following among investors. Armed with Vodafone's highly-valued shares, he has succeeded in buying up two of the most desirable communications companies in the world.

Mr Sarin, now head of Vodafone's US operations, denies that this was simply a matter of luck. "It's a matter of timing and currency. Chris had the best currency of the three companies over the past 18 months."

Yet even this might not have been enough to win the day. An urbane, pragmatic executive, Mr Gent has also proved highly adaptable, demonstrating a willingness to bend to events and fashion his strategy to fit circumstances that he has not always been in control of.

"He has got the art of consensus, the art of compromise," says Scott Mead, the Goldman Sachs banker who has masterminded Mr Gent's rise "It doesn't mean he gives things away he sees the opportunity to achieve closure."

That is a view strongly echoed by Mr Sarin, who says: "He's a great compromiser. He doesn't get stuck on a point."

It was that skill that allowed Mr Gent first to outflank Bell Atlantic, then to turn around and form a joint venture with the US company. It was also a skill that helped to breach Mannesmann's defences last week: by securing Vivendi, the French communications and utilities group, as an ally last weekend, Mr Gent effectively robbed Klaus Esser, his rival, of his last potential ally.

Critics accuse the Vodafone chairman of having given away too much to win these important truces in Bell Atlantic's case, by giving up control of his US operations, and in Vivendi's by agreeing to hand over control of France. But they cannot deny that those compromises have allowed him to come out on top.

"We had the footprint in France rather than someone else it could have been British Telecom."

Mr Gent's deal-making has also prompted questions of whether he is sufficiently attuned to the cultural sensitivities involved in absorbing a German company. During the takeover battle he severely dented his credibility with unguarded comments about Mr Esser's love of German poetry.

Mr Gent says the issues are similar to the integration of AirTouch, a process he claims has gone "very well".

"We had to convince them that we had a very consensual approach at the top levels, and a very collegiate management team," says Mr Gent.

One factor in Vodafone's favour is its lack of a strong corporate bureaucracy. Its penny-pinching attitude to costs - an inheritance from Sir Ernest Harrison and Sir Gerald Whent the former chairmen - still remains.

And Mr Gent adds that the traditional view of British corporations is also changing helped by relatively young companies like Vodafone. He describes the company as an informal organisation where he will discuss strategy with the cleaner and employees will stop him in Newbury high street to ask him how the business is going.

"That informality cuts through a lot of cultural barriers," he says.

With his unprecedented hostile attack to force a large German company into submission, Mr Gent is now likely to face the biggest cultural barriers of his career. His advisers say he plans to spend much of his time in the coming weeks in Dusseldorf, trying to mend damaged relations with Mannesmann. He had better leave his cricket bat at home.