Anyone who thinks there's a real plan behind all this, with every detail figured out, is kidding themselves. We've watched the same pattern play out, mainly cuts based on the bottom line, while bad managers and useless roles sail through. The only difference afterward? More work for the people who stay. And yeah, it's always worse.
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@fe lol for real what a joke. People don’t want machines doing their surgeries. All these jobs can only be automated when people trust the billionaire’s bots over humans and we’re a looonnnggg way off from that. But vz always jumps at the trend. AI is their next failure in waiting! Post it note in the house
@dh The growth was supposed to come from 5G. Remember all those use cases? Remote surgery! They never materialized. So now what? At some point there will be nothing left to cut by the old guards, and the new guards that replace them will not care. They're part of the new (job) every two. It's happening already.
@ak Correct but not relevant to the current situation. The US cellular market is now saturated after decades of rapid growth. Everyone has one or more lines. T-Mobile introduced unlimited plans over a decade ago and the rest had to follow suit. You can no longer charge per Gigabyte and juice your profits that way. Fixed Wireless is one area of growth but it isn’t a great business model. Incidentally, it was also pioneered by T-Mobile. Verizon and AT&T followed suit. So where is the growth going to come from?
Lowell used to tell a story about Steve Jobs saying he’d be satisfied if the operators only made one cent in profit while Apple took all the profits. We’re getting pretty close to that vision. All three operators are heavily subsidizing handsets which is hurting their profitability. “Get 4 iPhone 17’s on us” means the bulk of the profits are flowing to Apple.
Reorgs are a core competency of Verizon. The finance team even has a process to move the budget and outlook of even just one headcount transferring from one team to another. There’s no dollar amount to low to spend the labor cost of multiple BUs, finance orgs and systems teams to move the puzzle pieces around. Time well spent focused on the strategy of reorgs!
Investors care about one thing. Growth. You can't cut your way to growth, just the opposite. Until there is REAL growth, not cooked books growth, investors will treat us like a bond.
@ac AI is pure smokescreen. The existing Leadership has not changed so does anyone expect DEI/Strayer educated have the ability to reimagine?
The plan is very clear, it is to cut cost and that is through re-org and layoffs which would help into two ways :
1- direct cost saving of letting staff go in the form of wags, bonus, benefit, taxes..etc
2- indirect cost saving by cutting the useless projects that doesn't generate any revenue those laid off would do in the form of hardware, software, travelling ...etc
AI came out at the perfect timing to be used as cover up.
@OP The goal is to convince investors that we’re cutting costs while becoming more better and more efficient thanks to AI.
Investors can easily verify the cost cutting but there’s a lot of wiggle room on that second part and Dan would have cashed in and left before the verdict is in.