BT’s top table turnover continues

Jon James will become the CEO of BT Business on 3 March 2025.

Jon James will become the CEO of BT Business on 3 March 2025.

  • BT’s CEO, Allison Kirkby, continues her revamp of the UK telco’s leadership team
  • She has spent the past year replacing the top table old guard with new recruits  
  • Telco sector veteran and ‘IT dragon slayer’ Jon James has been drafted in as the new CEO of BT Business
  • He replaces Bas Burger, who is given the task of offloading BT’s international operations
  • The news comes as BT reports uninspiring fiscal third-quarter results

BT Group CEO Allison Kirkby has further revamped her top executive team line-up with the appointment of Jon James, the former CEO of Denmark’s Nuuday, as the new CEO of BT Business, the UK telco’s enterprise services division that has been struggling for several years. 

James will take on the poisoned chalice from 3 March. He will replace Bas Burger, who has been grappling with the tough turnaround assignment at BT Business since the start of 2023, shortly after the telco merged its Enterprise and Global units to form a single unit in order to cut costs – BT merges units to form BT Business and save £100m.

Burger had been the CEO of BT Global up to that point and, in a way, he will be going back to those roots starting in March, though this isn’t a glamorous assignment: Kirkby’s strategy is to focus on the UK, believing BT’s international operations are a distraction and a drag on margins, so Burger’s job will be to “devote all of his time to the optimisation of BT’s international operations and explore options for the unit,” the operator noted. Those options include trying to find a partner that could take a stake in a spun-out operation that would be underpinned by the next-generation Global Fabric infrastructure built over the past few years – see What now for BT’s Global Fabric?

James, meanwhile, will be tasked with reversing the fortunes of BT Business, which is shrinking by the quarter. Hopes are high that he could repeat his performance at Nuuday, the services company spun out of former Danish national operator TDC, where he is credited with revamping the company during his tenure as CEO, which began in mid-2021 and ended about a month ago. Critical to his turnaround strategy at Nuuday was an IT transformation that enabled the company to become a more agile, efficient and customer-centric company – see How Jon James slayed the Nuuday IT dragon.

Prior to his time at Nuuday, James held various senior positions at Tele2 Netherlands (2017-19), Swedish cable operator Com Hem (2014-2016) and the UK’s Virgin Media (2007-2013). 

“Jon’s considerable experience from the UK and European telecoms markets, together with his track record in leading businesses through transformation, will be hugely valuable as we fully focus BT Business on the UK,” noted Kirkby. 

James added: “I am excited and honoured to join BT as CEO of BT Business, the UK’s leader in B2B telecoms. BT Business has an unbeatable combination of deep customer relationships and world-class technology expertise, and I am looking forward to working with Allison, Bas and the BT Business team as we build an even stronger asset for our customers, our shareholders and for the UK.” 

James is the latest new name in the frame at BT’s top table, which has seen multiple changes since Kirkby took over as CEO a year ago. She added Tom Meakin, a former partner at consultancy McKinsey, as chief strategy and change officer and in September ousted chief digital and innovation officer Harmeen Mehta. Then in November 2024, Kirkby announced Claire Gillies as the new CEO of BT’s Consumer division, replacing Marc Allera. 

The numbers game

BT’s fiscal third-quarter trading update, released today, indicates the task ahead for Kirkby, Gillies and (from March) James. 

Total revenues for the three months to the end of December came to £5.18bn, down 3% year on year, with the decline mainly due to “continued challenging non-UK trading conditions” and lower smartphone sales for BT’s EE consumer division.  

BT Business, which is still the telco’s second-biggest division after the Consumer unit, reported a 2% decline in revenues, to £1.98bn (including sales to other parts of BT’s operations). For the first three quarters of the current financial year (April to December 2024), BT Business reported a 5% decline in revenues to £5.85bn, compared with the same period a year earlier, showing that the division’s sales are in steady decline. 

The Consumer division’s revenues were also down in the fiscal third quarter as well as during the first three quarters of the fiscal year, by 2% in both instances, though this is due to the impact of lower device sales: BT noted that Consumer returned to service revenues growth in the third quarter. 

Despite the declining revenues, BT Group’s margins are improving slightly, thanks to greater cost controls (a key focus of Kirkby’s strategy): Fiscal third-quarter adjusted EBITDA came in at £2.1bn, up 4% year on year. 

BT noted that its cost transformation plan “remains on track as we continue to create a simpler BT Group, delivering efficiencies across all units; energy usage in our networks was down 3% in the year to date, and total labour resource down 3% year on year to 117k; we achieved an 11% reduction in year-to-date Openreach repair volumes,” noted the operator. 

Openreach, BT’s quasi-autonomous wholesale fixed access network division, remains the division that continues to grow, albeit only slightly, with fiscal third-quarter revenues up by 1% to £1.53bn. 

Openreach’s focus is further building out and monetising its fibre access network. Having passed an additional 1 million premises with fibre in the fiscal third quarter, Openreach’s fibre-to-the-premises infrastructure now reaches 17 million UK premises and is on course to reach 25 million by December 2026. 

And there is strong wholesale demand for Openreach’s FTTP network: In the fiscal third quarter, net additions were 472,000 to take the total number of commercial fibre connections to 6 million with a take-up rate of 35%. However, Openreach is losing out to fibre access network rivals in areas where it hasn’t yet rolled out its own FTTP infrastructure: As a result, Openreach’s total broadband lines declined by 208,000. 

Overall, the numbers weren’t to the liking of investors, as BT’s share price dipped by 2.4% to 142.5 pence on the London Stock Exchange in Thursday morning trading. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV

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