- Verizon abruptly announced tech and telecom veteran Dan Schulman will take over as CEO of the company
- Schulman previously served as CEO of PayPal and was also a founding CEO of Virgin Mobile
- Outgoing chief Hans Vestberg will serve as a special advisor for one year
Just days after the end of the third quarter, Verizon’s Board of Directors decided they’d had enough and ousted Hans Vestberg as CEO, naming board member Dan Schulman to take his place.
The company said in a social media post that Schulman brings "a proven record of transformative leadership and deep telecom industry experience to help us enter our next chapter of growth."
Schulman has served as an independent director on the operator's board since 2018, the same year Vestberg was named CEO. The incoming CEO also notably served as CEO of PayPal as well as founding CEO at Virgin Mobile. He will assume his new position effective immediately.
Vestberg, 60, who was CEO at telecom vendor Ericsson before leading Verizon, will stay on to serve as a special advisor through October 2026.
Schulman, 67, takes over as Verizon has been losing subscribers in its mobile phone business. In the second quarter, consumer postpaid phone losses totaled 51,000, which followed a loss of 289,000 postpaid phone subscribers in Q1. The company reports its Q3 earnings on October 29.
“Verizon is at a critical juncture. We have a clear opportunity to redefine our trajectory, by growing our market share across all segments of the market, while delivering meaningful growth in our key financial metrics,” Schulman said in a statement.
Mark Bertolini, former head of health insurance company Aetna and Verizon’s newly elected board chairman, said Shulman is “the right leader to chart Verizon's next phase of increased customer focus and financial growth.”
Analyst: Verizon lacks growth story
Whereas T-Mobile has a mobile growth story and AT&T has a fiber growth story, Verizon has been losing subscribers, noted Roger Entner, analyst at Recon Analytics.
“Verizon made its financial numbers by extracting more money from fewer and fewer customers, which is not a long-term winning strategy,” he said. “One of the things that Verizon really needs is a balanced scorecard, where not only financial metrics are important, but also subscriber metrics.”
Entner said he thinks Schulman’s appointment is a stop-gap measure and eventually, Sowmyanarayan Sampath, Vestberg’s heir apparent, is likely to take over. Sampath is currently CEO of the Consumer Group at Verizon.
“The company has been struggling,” Entner said. “I think this gives Dan the opportunity to do a lot of probably painful things before he hands it over to the longer-term CEO, and that’s in all likelihood Sampath.”
It’s the second CEO change among the Big 3 carriers to be announced recently. Two weeks ago, T-Mobile said that CEO Mike Sievert, 56, is stepping down, handing the executive reins over to Srini Gopalan, 55, effective November 1.
Verizon shares were down about 4%, to $41.83, in early morning trading.
This is a developing story. More details and analysis will follow.