AT&T’s Randall Stephenson talks to the Brunswick Review about strategy, technology and trust
AT&T is the world’s largest telecommunications company with 2009 revenues topping $123bn. Randall Stephenson became Chairman and CEO in 2007, following a career with the company that included executive positions in operations, finance, marketing and the international business.
Under his leadership over the past three years, AT&T has led the US wireless industry in mobile broadband expansion, and the company has built on its position as a premier provider of communications services to enterprises around the globe.
The Brunswick Review sat down with Stephenson at his Dallas headquarters to get his perspective on the communications industry and his approach to managing change.
Shortly after Stephenson became CEO , some people were surprised when he said that AT&T would be known as a wireless company. Why did he make that statement? ‘There were a couple of reasons,’ he says. ‘Mobility was where the growth was, where our future was going to be. So, it was really important internally, because for the most part we didn’t see ourselves as a wireless company at the time. When you think about how we grew up as a company, most of our people had a history in wired communications.
‘At that point, in 2007, SBC had just completed the acquisition of its former parent, AT&T Corp., which gave us a global internet protocol (IP) backbone and a global base of enterprise customers – tremendous assets. So, it was natural that our perspective was grounded in wireline. But we had also combined our wireless business with BellSouth’s to give us national scale and, looking ahead, mobility was going to be the driver for the industry. At the same time, we were beginning the process of rebranding our wireless business to AT&T. So, it was also important to help establish mobility at the center of the AT&T brand.’
Looking back, the transition to mobile broadband happened faster than anyone expected. ‘You know, I got pushback at the time I made that wireless statement, from employees and from some shareholders. But when you look at the explosion in mobile broadband adoption and usage we’ve seen over the past three years, all the devices that have come out and the growth in mobile apps, the pace of innovation is just amazing. I think it’s fair to say people have underestimated the growth in mobile broadband every step of the way.’
The press has called mobile broadband a ‘revolution,’ and Stephenson has said it ‘changes everything.’ How? ‘If you look at the history of mobile communications, when we mobilize a function, its value and its usage have jumped. It started in the 1980s, when we built out the first cellular networks and we mobilized voice. What we saw was that overall voice usage actually grew. I think a lot of people thought minutes would just migrate, they expected a shift from fixed-line to mobile, and we saw some of that. But the even bigger change was that total voice usage grew.’