UPD Musical Chairs as Virgin Media UK Shakes Up its Executive Committee

Cable broadband and TV provider Virgin Media (Liberty Global) has today announced a big shake-up of their top-level Executive Committee, which includes a bunch of new appointments to help oversee the creation of three new customer units for Consumer, Business and Mobile.

Internally Virgin Media are known to have been suffering from a few frustrations (here), mostly since Liberty Global gobbled the business a few years ago (here). However, outwardly their image has in fact been boosted by the £3bn Project Lighting network expansion, recent speed boosts (here) and other improvements (new TV set-top-box, championing clearer advertising of broadband speeds etc.).

Never the less it’s sometimes necessary to reorganise the management a bit. As a result Virgin Media’s board and its CEO, Tom Mockridge, have established three new customer units and this in turn means that their Executive Committee needs a few tweaks.

The Executive Committee Changes

* The current Senior Vice President and Chief Transformation Officer of Liberty Global, Dana Strong, has taken the helm of VM’s new Consumer unit and been appointed as the operator’s President and Chief Operating Officer.

* The former MD of TalkTalk Mobile, Jeff Dodds, has re-joined VM to become the operator’s new Managing Director of Mobile. Jeff has worked in senior roles at VM before, although before moving to TalkTalk he also worked at Tele2 Netherlands on a project that helped to turn the operator into a full quad-play provider.

* The Managing Director of Virgin Media Business, Peter Kelly, will see his role being expanded by taking on responsibility for an enlarged Business division which now includes Business Customer Operations (BCO).

On top of this Rob Evans, who was previously MD of Core Network and Operations, has now taken on responsibility for the delivery of Project Lightning with a dual reporting line to Tom Mockridge (VM CEO) and Balan Nair, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Liberty Global.

The Revised Executive Committee

Dana Strong – President and Chief Operating Officer

Robert Dunn – Chief Financial Officer

Rob Evans – Manging Director, Lightning

Peter Kelly – Managing Director, Virgin Media Business

Jeff Dodds – Managing Director, Mobile

Mine Hifzi – General Counsel

Brigitte Trafford – Chief Corporate Affairs Officer

Catherine Lynch – Chief People Officer

Tony Hanway – Chief Executive Officer, Virgin Media Ireland

UPDATE 29th March 2017

Now we know why they’ve suddenly made all these changes and it relates to the misleading progress of their UK network expansion (here).