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.”