Sir Christopher is hoping to sell a million camera phones across Europe by March next and many more beyond the end of its current financial yearTelecom chief Sir Christopher Gent is irate at negative coverage and is betting big on new suite of data services due in autumn.

Sir Christopher Gent is under the distinct impression that some people are out to get him and the mobile phone group he has headed for the past five years. Companies often whinge about their press coverage but Sir Christopher thinks there is real malice at work in some sections of the media.

"There is scalp-hunting going on, regardless of whether the scalp is there to be taken or not," he says.

This week the chairman, Lord MacLaurin, mounted a spirited defence of the business and its high-profile chief executive. Describing some recent coverage as odious, he tried to explain to small investors at the annual meeting in London that the business is in better shape than the newspaper clippings - and the share price - suggest.

"To use a cricketing analogy, he wanted to be on the front foot," says Sir Christopher in the boardroom at company headquarters in Newbury - one of 64 sites Vodafone has dotted around the Berkshire market town. From the end of this month, staff will start moving into a new high-tech home outside the town.

He goes on. "I think one does get a bit concerned when one sees an article or a headline questioning our accounting practices on the morning of our annual general meeting, on something which is not questionable and trying to make something out of nothing. You have got to say that some papers do appear to have lost the plot."

It may sound like sour grapes - after all, he is paid a great deal of money to have a thick skin - but Sir Christopher believes the attacks have moved beyond legitimate concerns about the company's ability to deliver.

"Most of the time, frankly, you turn the other cheek and get on with life. But sometimes you do have to say something."

Especially, he says, during the current turmoil in the markets, with investors increasingly jittery about corporate integrity in the wake of scandals at telecoms companies such as WorldCom and Qwest - which is why he recently started a libel action against one broadsheet newspaper that drew comparisons between Vodafone and some of its disgraced rivals.

He jealously guards his private life - getting him to talk about home and family is like pulling teeth - but Sir Christopher vigorously defends his position as a businessman. "I think it is a question of integrity. If you have got a straightforward relationship with your customers and shareholders, and people - by creative writing - try to undermine it, that is where you have got to draw the line."

He suspects "a degree of arrogance" in some parts of the newspaper world. The same charge has been laid at the door of Vodafone's management team, especially over the huge pay packets received by its senior directors. The row began two years ago over a £10 million (€16 million) bonus paid to Sir Christopher; in the end he was forced to take half in shares.

That experience caused the company to go back to the drawing board and consult its largest British-based investors about a new remuneration policy. Despite criticism from some investors about the plan Vodafone came up with - arguably the most transparent remuneration policy of any FTSE 100 company - it received 85 per cent support at the annual meeting.

"The thing that encouraged me and I know encouraged the board, particularly Penny Hughes who heads our remuneration committee, was to see that we also won with the small shareholders as well as the large institutions," Sir Christopher points out.

Some depicted the vote as a setback. "All we want is a bit of balance," Sir Christopher pleads. A balanced view, however, is one of the few things that the market does not have about Vodafone at present. Since the heady days of the ambitious acquisitions of Mannesmann in Germany and AirTouch in the US, the share price has been in decline. Large sections of the City are concerned about the prospects for revenue growth in the business. Some even rate the business as little more than a utility company.

A company that analysts two years ago were suggesting could be worth £7.50 a share is now rated at less than £1 and some in the market think it could sink further. Hedge fund managers are having a field day with one of Britain's largest stocks during the current stock market volatility.

At the annual meeting, shareholders bemoaned the dire performance, which has wiped more than £100 billion off the company's paper valuation and left small investors nursing heavy losses.

Sir Christopher is adamant that the underlying state of the business, which last year generated more than £2 billion of pure cash after investing more than £4 billion in its network, is good and its prospects better. "I think it will be late this year before you start to see the good financial performance and the combination of new products and services really getting into investors' consciousness. It could be that by the time we get to next years a.g.m. the shares will be travelling north again."

Vodafone is betting big on a new suite of data services under the Vodafone Live umbrella due in the autumn. Included will be picture messaging, from which Vodafone is expecting great things, based on experience in Asia; users of its Japanese Movie Sha-Mail service spend 25 per cent more than traditional customers.

Sir Christopher is hoping to sell about a million camera phones across Europe by March next year and many more beyond the end of its current financial year. "That is when the uptick in revenues will start to bite. If we get the phones delivered on time and therefore we have enough to make a decent Christmas sales push and we get hundreds of thousands of phones sold, I believe it will be a leading indicator of something good to come."

Vodafone believes it has a secret weapon in the fight for picture messaging customers: a new phone that can handle 60,000 colours, compared with the 256 that Sony Ericsson's recent T68i, being sold by rival T-Mobile, can reproduce.

Picture messaging is obviously a stepping stone to the sort of new services that will one day be available over the next generation of mobile phone networks, known as 3G. Vodafone's 3G network will be open in parts of Europe by October but customers are going to have to wait before the marketing department makes any real noise about the latest technology.

"My genuine feeling about this is that by about midway through next year we will be able to turn on the services for real customers, assuming the handsets have been properly debugged, and then start ramping up sales in the second half of next year - but they will not come in huge volume."

That gives Britain's new entrant, Hutchison 3G - or Three, as it now wishes to be known - a headstart as it prepares to introduce a high-speed service in November. Sir Christopher wishes them well but has concerns that if Three rushes out an unreliable service the industry could be harmed.

"Right now it is time to build confidence rather than have it undermined," he insists. An apt message for Vodafone. - (Guardian News Service)