Sowmyanarayan Sampath is out as CEO of Verizon Consumer Group, effective March 31. Dan Schulman announced the departure this morning in an internal letter layered with corporate gratitude and strategic intent. Alfonso Villanueva, Schulman’s former PayPal colleague who joined Verizon barely ten weeks ago as Chief Transformation Officer, takes the interim role. The word interim is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
I wrote in October that Sampath was “the undisputed heir apparent” and that Schulman’s appointment was a “special mission with a defined timeline” designed to set the stage for Sampath to inherit the company. I was wrong. So was most of Wall Street. When you’re wrong, you say so, explain why, and recalibrate.
The $4 Million Tell
The signs were in the SEC filings. The 8-K/A filed on October 14, nine days after Schulman took the CEO job, disclosed a $4 million one-time retention RSU award for Sampath, vesting December 31, 2027. You don’t pay someone $4 million to stay unless you think they might leave, and you don’t think they might leave unless the succession conversation went badly. That retention award was designed to keep Sampath in place while Schulman assessed the team. It was a bridge, and it led nowhere.
Schulman came in with his own vision and his own people. Villanueva arrived from PayPal on November 20. Within two months, he had absorbed strategy, corporate development, data/analytics/AI, and supply chain under his Transformation Organization. Now he runs the consumer business too. This wasn’t a performance termination. Sampath was most likely told he would not succeed Schulman as Verizon CEO. Once that became clear, his departure was inevitable. An executive of his caliber with multiple offers wasn’t going to stay as a subordinate with no path to the top job.
The Q4 Numbers: Schulman’s Plan, Sampath’s Execution
The Q4 results need proper attribution. Verizon added 551,000 consumer postpaid phone subscribers in Q4, the best quarter since 2019. For the full year, consumer postpaid phone net adds came to positive 137,000 after losses of 356,000 in Q1, 51,000 in Q2, and 7,000 in Q3. Add the Business segment’s 225,000 phone net adds and total retail postpaid phone connections grew by roughly 362,000 in 2025. Verizon broke even on its most important subscriber metric after years of persistent losses.
That Q4 turnaround was Schulman’s strategy. He directed the spend-to-grow posture during his October earnings call. Sampath executed the plan, delivering 2,679,000 consumer postpaid phone gross additions in Q4, up 15% year-over-year. The gross add performance was strong. The churn problem remains: 0.95% in Q4 versus 0.88% a year ago, part of a steady climb from 0.83% in Q1 2024 across every single quarter. That 12-basis-point churn increase on a base of 75 million consumer postpaid phones translates to roughly 90,000 additional lost subscribers per quarter, or about $540 million in annualized revenue walking out the door that wasn’t leaving two years ago. Stopping that escalation is the unresolved challenge.
The financial profile tells the story of what aggressive growth costs. Consumer segment EBITDA for full year 2025 was $43.8 billion on revenue of $106.8 billion, a margin of 41.0% versus 41.8% in 2024. The Q4 consumer EBITDA margin compressed to 36.5% from 37.5% a year ago, and wireless equipment revenue jumped to $8.2 billion from $7.5 billion as Verizon spent heavily on device subsidies to drive those gross adds. The fundamental tension Schulman is navigating: buy growth now, restructure costs to fund it, and find the right permanent leader to sustain both without destroying the margin structure that supports a $11.5 billion annual dividend.
Where the October Analysis Broke Down
The October analysis underestimated Schulman’s intensity. He cut 13,000 jobs within weeks, began franchising 179 retail stores, and brought in his own transformation chief from PayPal. That’s not bridge management. It also underestimated the depth of the board’s frustration. Verizon’s consumer postpaid phone base was essentially flat for three consecutive years. ARPA kept climbing, from $141.31 in Q1 2024 to $147.36 in Q4 2025, but extracting more revenue from a stagnant base is a finite strategy. Most simply, Sampath was told he wouldn’t get the CEO job. Stay and execute someone else’s vision with no upside, or leave and run something. He chose correctly.
The Rescue Team Has an Expiration Date
Schulman and his team are a rescue operation, not a long-term management structure. Schulman is 67. His contract runs through December 2027. Villanueva is from the same professional generation. They will be gone in two years regardless of how well the transformation goes.
The Consumer Group CEO hire isn’t just about filling Sampath’s seat. It’s an audition for the person who will eventually run all of Verizon. Whoever takes this job permanently is being positioned for the corner office. That changes the candidate profile: Verizon isn’t looking for a division head. It’s looking for a future CEO who starts in the consumer role, with the operational depth to run a $107 billion revenue business and the strategic vision to navigate convergence across wireless, fiber, and FWA.
It also changes the competitive dynamics of the U.S. wireless market. A Consumer CEO who is auditioning for the overall CEO job cannot tread water. Treading water gets you passed over. Going backward is unthinkable. The person in that seat will have every incentive to compete aggressively, because their personal career trajectory depends on delivering visible, measurable wins on a compressed timeline. Whoever lands in this role will be the most motivated competitor Verizon has fielded in years.
Why Europe
The permanent replacement will most likely come from outside the United States. The reason is structural: non-compete agreements. Any senior executive at AT&T, T-Mobile, or a major cable operator is almost certainly bound by non-compete clauses. International candidates, particularly from European operators, don’t carry that baggage. European non-competes are weaker by law, and the competitive overlap with Verizon’s U.S. consumer business is zero.
Verizon’s one unambiguous success in the Consumer Group CEO role was Ronan Dunne, recruited from O2 in the UK. He ran O2 for eight years, grew its base from 18 million to 25 million, and served five productive years at Verizon. The one failure, Manon Brouillette from Canada’s Videotron, proves that scale matters, not that international hires are risky. O2 was the right weight class. Videotron was not.
T-Mobile’s succession provides a useful contrast. Srini Gopalan wasn’t an outside hire. He was an inside-the-family transfer from Deutsche Telekom, moved from running Germany to COO at T-Mobile US with the explicit understanding he was the successor. Verizon doesn’t have a European parent to draw from, so it has to recruit externally from that same talent pool. Given the CEO audition dynamic, the candidate needs to be someone who has already won competitive battles at scale. There’s no time for on-the-job learning. The FT reported headhunters are already active. Schulman needs that person in the consumer seat by mid-2026.
The Immediate Math
Near-term operational risk is manageable. Villanueva owns both the transformation portfolio and the consumer P&L, eliminating finger-pointing during restructuring. The new value proposition launches in H1 2026. The longer-term risk is strategic: the $20 billion Frontier acquisition needs consumer-side integration, FWA grew to 5.7 million combined subscribers, Fios internet hit 7.3 million, and total broadband topped 13.6 million. Each growth vector requires a permanent consumer leader with deep telecom operating experience. Villanueva was hired for transformation, not operations.
Verizon’s Consumer Group has turned over its leader four times in seven years. Dunne served five years and built the 5G consumer strategy. Brouillette lasted less than one. Sampath stabilized the business over two years but wasn’t Schulman’s pick. Villanueva is holding the seat with ten weeks of Verizon experience. Every transition resets institutional momentum, disrupts middle management, and gives competitors a window. The revolving door is itself a competitive disadvantage, and it compounds: each new leader inherits not just the business challenges but the organizational scar tissue from the last transition.
Schulman and Villanueva are the rescue team. They’ll stabilize and restructure. But they’re not the long-term answer, and everyone involved knows it. The permanent Consumer Group CEO hire is the most consequential personnel decision Verizon will make this year, because that person is almost certainly being positioned to eventually run the whole company, and because an executive auditioning for that job will compete with an intensity Verizon hasn’t shown in years. The non-compete constraints, the Dunne precedent, and the active headhunter outreach all point to Europe. Get it right, and Verizon’s competitors face a newly dangerous opponent backed by the largest network in the country. Get it wrong, and the revolving door spins again.