Telia Co AB boss Allison Kirkby is taking the helm at BT Group Plc, assuming the role of chief executive officer from Philip Jansen.
(Bloomberg) — Telia Co AB boss Allison Kirkby is taking the helm at BT Group Plc, assuming the role of chief executive officer from Philip Jansen.
Kirkby will join Britain’s challenged former state monopoly — its biggest broadband network operator — around the end of January at the latest, BT said in a statement on Monday.
Kirkby said in a statement that she is “fully supportive” of BT’s strategy. She had been rumored as a contender to head London-based BT for years and joined its board in 2019. She’ll get the same salary as her predecessor, which has been held flat since 2019.
The new CEO will have to tackle a slumping stock price and try to get a return on BT’s £15 billion ($19.3 billion) fiber optic network investment, while balancing stakeholders including the government, unions, and the company’s two big strategic shareholders — French telecom tycoon Patrick Drahi and Germany’s Deutsche Telekom AG.
BT shares were down 0.6% at 8:41 a.m. in London, tracking a broader market decline.
In the past eight years Kirkby headed three of the biggest Scandinavian telecom companies. She led Swedish telecom giant Telia Co AB since 2020, before that Denmark’s TDC A/S, and prior to that Sweden’s Tele2 AB. BT and Telia are two of the world’s oldest phone companies, both founded in the mid 19th century.
BT Chairman Adam Crozier cited Kirkby’s “deep sector expertise and a history of having transformed businesses.”
Scotland-born Kirkby, 56, is BT’s first female CEO and joins new Vodafone Group Plc boss Margherita Della Valle as one of a small number of women leading companies in the FTSE 100 Index of Britain’s largest. Adding to France’s Orange SA CEO Christel Heydemann, women have taken three of the top European telecom jobs in the last 18 months.
Jansen said earlier this month he would step down from the role, after joining BT in early 2019. He intends to retire from executive life after the handover, the company said.
Infrastructure
At her last two businesses, Kirkby headed big infrastructure deals, a major theme across the European telecommunications sector and a resume which could fuel years-long investor speculation around BT’s giant infrastructure unit Openreach.
During Kirkby’s tenure, TDC’s operations were broken up between networks and services by a consortium led by Australian asset manager Macquarie Group Ltd. More recently, she sold mobile towers from Telia to private equity titan Brookfield Asset Management Limited, where she sits as a non-executive director.
Like the last two BT CEOs, Jansen and Gavin Patterson, Kirkby spent an earlier portion of her career at Procter & Gamble Company, and was hired there by former long-time Sky boss Jeremy Darroch.
In a note to clients, Berenberg analyst Carl Murdock-Smith said Kirkby had been picked over the “favorite” for the role, Marc Allera, who leads BT’s Consumer division, and speculated that the executive might question his future at the company. Bloomberg previously reported Allera was in the running. A representative for Allera declined to comment.
“In addition, we would note that BT’s CFO Simon Lowth and Openreach CEO Clive Selley have both been in their roles for over seven years and are now in their 60s. We do wonder if BT is about to enter a period of heightened senior management churn, potentially increasing re-base risk for the business,” he wrote.
–With assistance from Charles Daly.
(Updates with context throughout, shares in 5th paragraph.)
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