AT&T Taps Stephenson as CEO

AT&T TAPS STEVENSON AS CEO
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Dionne Searcey dionne.searcey@wsj.com and Jessica E. Vascellaro]
AT&T announced on Friday that longtime Chairman and CEO Edward Whitacre will step down in June and be replaced by COO Randall Stephenson. Mr. Stephenson, who holds a master's degree in accounting from the University of Oklahoma, was a key architect of AT&T's recent acquisition of BellSouth Corp. He embraces the technology his company peddles using laptops and GSM cards, and is of a different ilk than Mr. Whitacre, who came to AT&T in 1963 as a facility engineer. Mr. Stephenson inherits unique challenges facing phone companies whose very core business -- landline phone service -- is diminishing in the age of wireless and Internet phone calls. While some phone companies, like Sprint-Nextel Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc., have shed landlines and focused on wireless service, a growth business, AT&T has cherished its landline service. It is bundling it with wireless and TV offerings and testing devices that will converge the two services. Like other large telecom players, AT&T will have to navigate new technologies that make communications easier for consumers and seek to bring them to market without cannibalizing traditional revenues too much. AT&T will turn its attention increasingly abroad as it aims to become the preferred provider of telecommunications services to multinational corporations around the world. Mr. Stephenson said Friday that, on the international scene, AT&T is going to look for business partners rather than make large acquisitions, though he added that the company may look for small acquisitions around the world to better serve large corporate clients. AT&T has a slew of new competitors, including Google and cable companies that in the past two years have aggressively entered the phone business.
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