BT Group Confirm UK CEO Philip Jansen to Exit Within 12 Months
Broadband and phone giant BT Group (inc. Openreach, Plusnet and EE) has this morning announced that the operator’s current CEO, Philip Jansen, is to leave the business “at an appropriate moment over the next 12 months“. Since taking on the role in February 2019, the operator’s share price has fallen from around 230p to 122p.
Back in 2019 few people doubted that BT needed to change, particularly as the operator was starting to face more competition in network infrastructure and had struggled to turn their big bet on TV and sports content into the lucrative money spinner that it might have once hoped.
Part of Jansen’s approach was to respond to this by doubling-down on the rollout of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) lines across the UK, while also continuing a major cost-cutting drive (e.g. job losses and restructuring), reducing the operator’s focus on the Pay TV market and simplifying their branding by turning EE into BT’s “flagship consumer brand” for broadband and phone, as well as mobile (we still have our doubts about that).
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However, Jansen’s tenure in BT’s top job hasn’t been without its own set of problems, which could be seen during the operator’s recent battle with unions in a pay dispute that caused a series of national strikes – BT’s first since 1987. At the same time as that, the operator’s CEO was getting a 32% pay increase and has separately continued to face growing speculation of a takeover by Patrick Drahi’s Altice UK (here) or Deutsche Telekom (here).
On top of all that, Jansen also got himself into hot water during a controversial interview with the FT, which caused “significant concern” at Ofcom (here) after he appeared to suggest that, once the rollout of full fibre had completed, there was “only going to be one national network” and it would all “end in tears” for some altnets. Jansen has since said that his comments were taken out of context.
Suffice to say that many were not too surprised when, during March 2023 (here), the first reports began to suggest that the operator may have already begun the hunt for a new boss and this has today been confirmed.
Adam Crozier, BT Group Chairman, said:
“Philip has done an excellent job in his time at BT and the Board is fully supportive of our long-term strategy which he and his team are pursuing. Whilst we are still in the early years of that transformation we are on track to deliver.
The succession process to replace Philip is something that the Board was well prepared for. All appropriate candidates are being considered and we expect to be able to update the market on progress over the course of the summer. In the meantime, it is business as usual, and we are focused on executing our plans and delivering for all our stakeholders.”
Philip Jansen, BT Group Chief Executive, said:
“We’ve made a lot of progress over the last four and half years and I’m proud of what we’ve achieved to date. We’re investing heavily in both BT’s and the UK’s future. We’re building like fury, have now passed over 11m homes with fibre, have got 5G service to 68% of the country and our customer service is much improved.
This is creating a much stronger BT Group which is starting to drive growth for both investors and the UK. But there’s a lot more to do and I am fully committed to driving the business forward until I hand over to my successor.”
The reality is that it’s now 2023 and the BT Group will need to have one eye on both their future strategy (after the completion of their full fibre network) and Ofcom’s next strategic market review, as well as various 5-yearly market reviews, which is one area that will require them to have good relations with the regulator (recent FT comments have not helped). Not to mention the extremely complex retirement process for thousands of old telephone exchanges and copper cables.
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However, replacing CEO often brings with it changes in strategy, which means that any expectations of what BT may do over the next 5–10 years are once again subject to change. Much of this will depend upon who BT picks to replace Jansen, which could be somebody completely new, or they could look to promote in-house by appointing the current head of BT’s Consumer brands, Marc Allera.
Finally, it’s also worth remembering that BT’s future fortunes are also partly dependent upon what happens to their competitors, which is most evident in the UK’s full fibre market, where the operator faces a rapidly growing threat from hundreds of alternative networks. Consolidation will inevitably whittle this field down, but BT cannot avoid the fact that they will not enjoy the same dominance as before. The only upside of this for them is that Ofcom’s future regulation of the incumbent is likely to soften, but we don’t expect any major shifts on that until after 2030.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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good i for one are glad he is stepping down …. remove bt from the high street sell bt tv /sport ,slow down fibre build ,close plusnet
u wot m8?
Jansen has halved the share price, turned the staff against the senior management and will leave a trail of destruction for his predecessor.
Good riddance. Moral has never been as low under his tenure
Handsomely rewarded for abject failure what a clown foodbank Phil
That is the problem with society today though isn’t it. Rewarded massively for being a complete failure. Win win situation for Phil taking the job, regardless of the damage left in his wake.
Philip Jansen’s legacy will be the fttp rollout, finally realising that they must go fibre only. EE, BT and Plusnet branding is a mess.
The Reality is that they never needed 3 brands. PN should be released from BT and back to being independent.
Thats where it thrived and did well.
Well buying PlusNet was all about the Quad Play nonsense that was the wa wa that was used to drown out the ‘why are you not investing in your ancient network’ conversation.
I agree that the single FTTP networks will go down as being a sensible move as was agreeing the exchange wind down and copper withdrawal with OFCOM. None of those are small achievements.
However, I do think that OR could have been and could be more punchy with picking PCP / DSLAM’s that can be shut down with a bit of targeted intervention. Without targeted intervention copper is going to be hanging around for a lot long than it needs to be and there is a big cost attached to that.
I am TBH rather surprised that there are not already progress announcements on DSLAM withdrawal where FTTP is fully covering MDU’s etc. It is no small task shutting down the DSLAM estate but it needs to get started.
Cue waffle about engineering challenge and OFCOM. If there is full coverage from FTTP OFCOM won’t care. Getting the ISP’s to switch over to FTTP is better for them as there are less faults. What is really needed are individual sunset dates for individual DSLAMs – none of this wide area stuff otherwise there will be challenges over some of the EO lines etc.
Lost the dressing room and the owners a long time ago. Another one disappearing in a Lear Jet stuffed with cash. I hope they promote a BT lifer like they did with Selly at Openreach after a series of here today gone tomorrow chancers.
The BT CEO role is a poison chalace, anyone in that position will be wrong, no matter what direction they go in. BT is a toxic workplace and needs a proper shake up at all levels. 100k employees and barely making more than companies with 10k… something is seriously wrong. Elon musk fancy a go?
lol, there’s some bad takes but this takes the cake.
Musk is finally showing his “business prowess”, or rather the lack of when he can’t just get masses of US government subsidy as he did with Tesla (which he did not found) and SpaceX. Twitter is a shell of its former self and Facebook is starting to eat their lunch with a much less toxic platform.
Tesla’s share price is totally divorced from reality (how is it worth many times more than car companies with far higher output and competitive/better technology?).
BT’s is perhaps the other way, it’s a solid, profitable “unsexy” business that can’t just throw buzzwords around to add 25% on to the price as a startup can (who will go bust the instant the VCs stop funding it)
Twitter is objectively better than ever before in every possible metric. Number of daily active users is up, number of time spent on it is up, it’s hemorrhaging a lot less money, etc. Zuckerberg is literally getting sued for copying IP. By “much less toxic” you just mean it censors opposing opinions and facts you do not like. The feed is absolute garbage and does not even show you who you follow. It even goes as far as giving you a prompt if you follow who they do not like. They have so little confidence in their product that you cannot delete your twitterclone unless you also delete your instagram
Sounds like you are just sour at spaceman because you did not buy Tesla stock
John you just missed out on a comment about woke lefties and libtards and you would have the full bingo card.
Are you the same John of this (https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2022/09/sky-uk-unveil-broadband-based-stream-tv-box-without-satellite.html#comment-269417) post? Why do you think it would be easy to bypass a latency check? TTL would be easy of course, but I don’t see how you could bypass latency…
I think BT Group’s profitability (and possibly stock price) will depend on how fast they can get rid of legacy copper exchanges. Maintaining legacy exchanges mostly for the occasional benefit of low usage traditional domestic consumers is expensive. Their competitors don’t tend to have these low use customers, and making the cost of providing that service cheaper ought to be financially beneficial.
Yes massively so.
Dramatically accelerating exchange closures would save a very large amount of money but is complex and will annoy people. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to happen though.
POTs switch off is announced with an agreed end date? Not too far way now.
So the exchanges will largely close then and the wiring from PCP to exchange will then be redundant and won’t need to be maintained.
Sure there is fibre stuff in some of the exchanges but that is not a lot of footprint.
Appreciate people are happy to see him go, but I’m worried the next one will make things worse. BT needs to get nationwide FTTP by 2030, continue to streamline their competing brands or sell off Plusnet. Selfishly, if we see BT push to get FTTP in East London, the new CEO has won in my book.
Openreach wont be building where other operators already are (or not as much) — i assume you have some form of FTTP in east london already from someone else
@Fastman In general you are right, there is competition. Though in constituency it’s half VM. Altnets operate in pockets, but most people I know are on BT FTTC (I only have ADSL on my street)
OR target is 99% by 2030
This guy has done nothing for BT Group . Im pretty certain shareholders and employees will be glad to see him go
I think it’s long overdue that he was sacked, which what this is. Any CEO that halves the share price should probably be fired unless there is a really good justification for it. Yes he “realised” FTTP is a must for BT but way too late where is was pretty much obvious. Imagine if BT had used all the money they wasted innBT Sports to preemptively upgrade the whole network to FTTP 5 years ago? Altnets wouldn’t exist today and BT will be eating VM alive with better latency and 2/3Gb plans to claim the fastest internet connection in the UK. They could have started fo decom exchanges and shutdown copper infra and start to save real money, not just firing people off.
sport was used to drive Sky and others into Fibre market in early days of FTTC — sky at that time was only interesting in LLU , Sports drove sky into consuming FTTC
GreenLantern22: “Yes he “realised” FTTP is a must for BT but way too late where is was pretty much obvious.”
He only became CEO in Feb 19, by which time all the faffing over BT group’s strategy on FTTP had largely been resolved – added to which much of the faffing was essentially about agreeing with government and their regulator the rules and arrangements for rolling out FTTP. What you can hold him to account for is the OR FTTP roll out since, and anybody who’s actually worked on strategic infrastructure will recognise that programme to have been a staggering successful and fast effort. Such comments always elicit the “years before my area will be done/my street was left out/too slow/unfair to altnets” noise, but at a national level OR’s programme has been remarkably effective.
In terms of the share price, some of that’s out of his control – rising interest rates are really bad news when investing billions in FTTP, the London stock market has been declining for some years now due to UK pension funds stopping investing in equities (thanks to government policies), there’s the enduring legacy pension obligations still dragging, and the slow decline in the landline and leased line markets where the old BT held a dominant position.
I suspect he’s had enough of the stress of such a job, and it won’t help that he’s made himself persona non gratis with the regulator by pointing out the flaws in the altnet’s commercial ambitions.
Such a bad take that the BT Sport money was wasted. It stopped BT haemorrhaging broadband customers to Sky, brought competition to the sports broadcasting market and ultimately encouraged Sky to adopt fibre and share the rights. The idea that BT had some sort of multi billion pound cheque at that point to go out and build Full Fibre everywhere is ridiculous. BT spent £738 MILLION on their first Premier League deal, which lasted 3 years. That was a decade ago. Today they’re in the middle of spending £15 BILLION on getting FTTP to ‘only’ 25 million homes. The idea that spending that amount was a choice for them back then is laughable.
@Andrew G – Uptake for FTTP has been very, very high too compared to the rest of the world.
We will keep him until we get some other person stupid enough to take over, but then with the amount of money they get for running BT, they are quids in even if they stay in the job for just 12 months. Shame he is not staying, he may run BT even more into the ground. but then he could do even more damage until he go.
Quids in? In your world perhaps. His pay is pretty pathetic for running the UK’s single most important national infrastructure business, and crappy compared to international peers.
I wouldn’t do his job for that money, and if you think you would do it for 12 months and then run away laughing, then it indicates you’ve never had sufficient breadth of responsibility or close contact with such people to understand what a deeply stressful and all consuming role being a CEO of a major company is.
@anonymous, I must admit I have never been a CEO and I doubt I will ever be, but then he went into it, so he must have thought he was up to the job.
I was a deputy manager of a bakery, so I had some responsibility, but I got out of it due to stress, other things going on in my life at the time, plus the job.
I don’t disagree that it is a deeply stressful and all consuming role to be a CEO of a major company, but as i said above, their choice, and they normally get paid well for it, plus the bonuses and other perks.
Like the managers at work who saying about stress, as I said to one of them, if it is that bad then step down or get another job.
Wow Ad47uk, bet you’re a fun person to work with.