TELECOMT-Mobile’s New CEO
Answers the Call
After taking over from the legendary
John Legere in April, Mike Sievert has a plan
to dominate 5G—and dial up big gains.
BY AARON PRESSMAN
IT’S ONE THING to take over from
a successful CEO. It’s quite
another to follow in the footsteps
of a larger-than-life, brash-talking,
Twitter-fueled leader like T-Mobile’s
John Legere, who also happened to
transform the company into the No. 2
carrier and the dominant player in
5G, and quintupled the stock price
over his eight-year tenure. But by his
side the whole time was Mike Sievert,
who as of April won the top job upon
Legere’s retirement. While Sievert
brings a decidedly suburban Seattledad vibe to the party, he
also possesses top-notch
marketing chops honed at
some of America’s leading
brands.
To be sure, history shows
that following a star exec is
no easy task. Tim Cook has
successfully extended Steve
Jobs’ trailblazing path at
Apple, but whether it’s
Craig Barrett taking over
at Intel for Andy Grove or
Jeff Immelt following Jack
Welch at GE (see story on
the opposite page), the
Fortune 500 is littered with
succession stories that do
not go as planned.
And though Legere’s
glorious run included
adding more new custom-
ers than all his competi-
tors combined to tripleT-Mobile’s subscriber
base, analysts say there’s
still more opportunity for
Sievert, especially as con-
sumers are only starting
to seek the benefits of 5G
networks where T-Mobile
is well positioned to lead.
“Worst-to-first stories are
rare enough in American
business, but in telecom
they’re almost unheard
of,” longtime industry
analyst Craig Moffett at
MoffettNathanson Re-
search gushes. With lower
prices than AT&T and
Verizon plus a potentially
better network, “that’s a
powerful recipe for contin-
ued share gains,” he adds.
The reason T-Mobile is
considered the leader in
5G comes down to airwave
spectrum, the precious
but limited commodity
of the wireless industry.
Thanks to the Sprint deal,
T-Mobile has vast swaths
of underused spectrum in
the 2.5 GHz band, which
is well-suited for send-
ing speedy 5G traffic to
subscribers on the go or in
homes and businesses. Ver-
izon and AT&T don’t have
anything like it available
and have been bidding like
mad at the most recent fed-
eral airwave auction to try
to catch up. But those new
airwaves won’t be online
for a year or more.
The challenge is convinc-
ing sticky cell phone cus-
tomers at AT&T and Ver-
izon that T-Mobile’s 5G is
enough of a game changer
to switch allegiance. AllT-Mobile CEO Sievert
worked side by side with
John Legere, then took
the reins in April.COURTESY OF T-MOBILE