BT reveals new chief executive
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Editor
| 01 August 2023
Barely a fortnight after the UK’s leading telco said that it would search over the course of the summer for a successor to current CEO Philip Jansen, BT has appointed Telia president and CEO Allison Kirkby as its new chief executive.
BT allison kirkby 31July2023
Kirkby is the telco ‘s first-ever female leader and will take over the reins at BT around the end of January 2024 at the latest. “I’m incredibly honoured to have been appointed as the next chief executive of BT Group. BT is such an important company for the UK, and our many customers both in the UK and internationally and is uniquely placed to help everyone benefit from the rapid advances in digitalisation,” she said commenting on her appointment. “Our products and services have never been more important to how our customers live and work, and thanks to the significant investment BT is putting into digital infrastructure and in the modernisation of its services, I see us playing an even more important role going forward."

President & CEO of Swedish multinational telecommunications company and mobile network operator Telia Company since early 2020, Kirkby moved into the TMT sector in 2010, initially joining Virgin Media, and was most recently president & CEO of TDC (2018-2020), the largest telecommunications company in Denmark, and President & CEO of Tele2 AB (2015-2018) the largest challenger telecommunications company in Sweden and the Baltics.

Earlier in her career she held a number of financial and operational roles at Procter & Gamble (1990-2010) and qualified as a Chartered Management Accountant in 1990 whilst at Guinness plc. She has also been a non-executive director at BT Group since 2019 and is also a non-executive director and member of the audit committee of Brookfield Asset Management.

One of Kirkby's key tasks will be to continue the strategy set in place over the last four and a half years by Jansen to restructure the company and focus on developing core infrastructure offers, namely fixed fibre and 5G networks. BT has an objective of passing 25 million premises with gigabit fibre networks by 2026. In May 2023, after what it said was a year of continuing to build and connect like fury, BT published annual results showing a fibre-to-the-premise (FTTP) build of 702,000 premises passed in the fourth quarter of its 2023 fiscal at an average build rate of 54,000 per week, reaching 41% of its target.

Jansen will continue to serve as chief executive until the end of January 2024 at the latest and will be available to support the handover until the end of March 2024, at which point he intends to retire from executive life.