After seeing wireless subscriptions decline while it’s raised rates and fees on its services, Verizon is responding–by changing CEOs.
The New York firm announced Monday that its board had named its former lead independent director, Dan Schulman, as its new CEO, replacing Hans Vestberg in that role.
Schulman, who worked as PayPal’s chief executive from 2015 to 2023, starts immediately, while Vestberg will move to a “Special Advisor” role through Oct. 4, 2026, focused on closing out Verizon’s $20 billion purchase of the wireline carrier Frontier Communications.
In a LinkedIn post Monday, Schulman shared a message he sent to Verizon employees.
“Today, we stand at an important moment—we are going to move quickly and boldly to win in both mobility and broadband,” he wrote. “I fully intend for us to regain our leadership by growing share across all segments of the market, by consistently delighting our customers.”
Context for that “growing share” to-do item came in Verizon’s Q2 earnings, when the firm reported $5.1 billion in net income on $34.5 billion in operating revenues but also 51,000 wireless retail postpaid phone losses (an improvement on the 109,000 subscribers it lost in the year-ago quarter). Its net broadband growth of 293,000 was confined almost entirely to fixed wireless access, which saw 278,000 net additions in the quarter.
“Verizon under Hans borrowed from future viability to make today’s numbers,” said Roger Entner, analyst and founder at Recon Analytics. “They got more and more money out of a smaller and smaller customer base.”
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He wasn’t willing to give Verizon too much credit for its FWA success. “Cable still has a huge number of unhappy customers that are ready to leave,” Entner said. “That will continue to be the gift that keeps on giving.”
Verizon’s wireless service has lost customers and has consistently ranked lower than services reselling its own network in such customer-satisfaction surveys as the American Customer Satisfaction Index and PCMag’s Readers’ Choice awards.
In June, Verizon unveiled a new customer-service push in which a single “Customer Champion” will work the problem for you, announced in ads in which consumer CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath invited customers to email him directly.
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Entner endorsed a return to the goal of adding and keeping customers instead of trying to inflate the average revenue from each of them. “A healthy company grows based on subscriber growth, not on extracting more money from a smaller and smaller customer base,” Entner said.
PayPal is no stranger to fees and surcharges, but Entner voiced confidence in Schulman’s ability to “clean house” at his new employer and focus on customer experience.
Prior to leading PayPal, Schulman worked at American Express, Sprint Nextel, the now-defunct Sprint reseller Virgin Mobile, Priceline, and AT&T. In a 2008 interview with the New York Times, Schulman talked about how those earliest jobs taught him the importance of teamwork and also recounted a time when his work with an advocacy group for homeless teens led him to spend a night on the streets of New York alone.
“There’s a certain amount of deference paid to a CEO,” he told the Times’ Patricia R. Olsen. “No one paid attention to me on the street.”
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