Verizon to cut about 15,000 jobs as it restructures, source says

The layoffs, affecting about 15% of its workforce, are set to take place as soon as next week, the person said.

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Verizon’s shares rose about 1.4% on the news. They have largely stagnated over the last three years, with a gain of 8% compared with the S&P 500’s near-70% rise.

A Verizon spokesperson declined to comment.

The Wall Street Journal reported the cuts earlier.

Schulman said last month that Verizon understood it needs aggressive change including “cost transformation, fundamentally restructuring our expense base.”

“We will be a simpler, leaner and scrappier business,” he added.

Schulman, a Verizon board member for seven years, has said he does not want to hike prices and seeks to be more customer-focused. “Our financial growth has relied too heavily on price increases, a strategic approach that relies too much on price without subscriber growth is not a sustainable strategy,” he said last month.

Verizon maintains the highest price points in the sector, a strategy that analysts have said is difficult to sustain amid rising competitive intensity.

Craig Moffett, senior analyst at MoffettNathanson, said the new CEO’s first commitment was to stop the bleeding from subscriber churn, which would require subsidizing expensive handsets for a huge number of Verizon’s subscribers to keep them from leaving.

“The obvious question was how Verizon planned to pay for that. Now we know,” Moffett said. “What we don’t know is whether these cost reductions will actually help to offset the higher planned costs of retention” of customers.

In recent years, Verizon spent $52 billion to acquire key wireless C-Band spectrum in a 2021 auction and struck a $20 billion deal to acquire Frontier Communications last year. It also spent $6 billion to acquire prepaid mobile phone provider TracFone Wireless.

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