- Verizon’s 15,000 lay-offs could be announced as soon as November 20
- A large part of the cuts will come at Verizon stores
- Analysts, however, expect the axe could also fall on the network and enterprise sectors, as well as middle management
UPDATE: Nov. 20, 2025: Verizon CEO Dan Schulman announced that the Tier 1 operator would be cutting 13,000 jobs across the company. Cost-cutting will also impact "outsourced and other outside labor expenses," he wrote.
Original story follows: Now that Verizon is expected to slash 15,000 jobs very soon - its largest reduction ever - Fierce asked analysts where the cuts are expected to hit.
Holiday lay-offs
The job reductions will be officially announced on November 20, according to one source that Fierce Network talked to, but exactly where the cuts will occur is unknown at this point.
“Merry Christmas, here’s your pink slip,” Jeff Moore, principal at Wave7 Research, joked grimly on a phone call with Fierce last week.
Many of the reductions will come at the operator’s stores. “The WSJ did report that VZ was likely to shift ~200 stores from corporate to dealer,” Moore told Fierce in an email. “I can tell you that ~75% of Verizon stores are dealer stores already, so corporate stores will be fairly uncommon after the shift.”
“They are offloading all their company-owned stores, so this is a fairly large number of people going away,” noted analyst Jack Gold at J.Gold Associates. “I’ve also heard rumors that the enterprise sales teams might be affected, but I don’t have any real numbers here.”
Fierce has already reported that Verizon’s 5G Acceleration enterprise team, which deals with private networking and neutral host installations, could see cuts of up to 25% of its workforce. “Unknown how current deals and future opportunities will be supported, but likely a subset of 5G specialist[s] will be rolled over to enterprise sales group,” our source said.
“They’ve invested in it pretty heavily,” Moore said. “So I could see that as an area for cuts.”
Network cuts?
“Network strikes me as a low-hanging fruit for cuts because 5G has already been deployed,” Moore continued. “The ultra-wideband, with the mid-band capacity, that’s in the past as well, so that strikes me as an area for some cutbacks.”
Moore noted that there are layers of bureaucracy at Verizon that may be cut. “I have the impression that under Hans Vestberg the amount of pruning that needed to be done was not done,” Moore said of the previous CEO of Verizon. So possibly we should expect some middle management lay-offs along with all the others.
All of this has been motivated by the appointment of Dan Schulman as the new CEO on October 6 this year. Schulman has talked about cutting costs, divesting unprofitable parts of Verizon’s business and making Verizon a scrappier company. Now, a big part of that plan will come into play with the major lay-offs.