When Allison Kirkby walked into BT’s headquarters as chief executive in February 2024, she inherited a company that many investors had quietly written off. Britain’s oldest telecoms firm was burdened by heavy debt, a bloated workforce and years of costly investment in fibre broadband that had yet to pay off. Two and a half years later, BT looks like a different business, and Kirkby has become one of the most closely watched executives in British industry.
The numbers tell part of the turbulent story. Since she took charge, BT’s share price has climbed by roughly 70% to 80%, a striking turnaround for a stock that had spent years drifting lower. Her own compensation has grown alongside it. In the year to March 2026, Kirkby’s total pay package more than doubled to 5.6 million pounds, made up of salary and benefits, an annual bonus and a large tranche of long-term share awards that reflect BT’s improved market value. It is now the largest pay packet handed to a telecoms boss in Britain in more than a decade, and it has drawn criticism from unions and campaigners who point out that the reward has come alongside tens of thousands of job losses.
Kirkby’s approach has been built on a simple premise. BT’s predecessor, Philip Jansen, spent billions building out full-fibre broadband across the European country, a huge and expensive bet on the United Kingdom’s digital future. Kirkby arrived just as that spending was nearing its peak, which allowed her to start dialling it back and shift the company’s focus toward harvesting returns from the network rather than continuing to build it at the same pace.
She set out to strip three billion pounds of costs from the business by 2029 and has since raised that target to 3.7 billion pounds by 2030, extending the programme by a year. BT has already delivered 1.5 billion pounds of annual savings, and its overall workforce has fallen by around seven per cent in the past year alone, down to roughly 108,000 employees. By the end of the decade, the combined headcount across BT is expected to settle somewhere between 75,000 and 80,000, toward the lower end of a range first floated back in 2023.
That scale of cost-cutting has not been without pain, but it has won over the city. BT’s revenue for the last financial year came in at 19.7 billion pounds, a modest decline from the year before, yet pre-tax profit rose 8% to 1.4 billion pounds. The company has also unveiled a new policy on returning cash to shareholders, and it maintains that it is transforming ahead of schedule, even as it juggles network investment, dividends and further restructuring.
The most significant recent move has been the agreement with Verizon to combine the two companies’ international enterprise businesses into a new joint venture. The deal brings together BT International and Verizon’s international enterprise wireline arm into a single platform designed to serve large multinational clients who need secure, reliable connections that work seamlessly across borders and cloud systems.
The new venture will serve more than 3,000 customers in over 180 countries and will generate close to four billion US dollars in combined annual revenue. Both companies will hold equal stakes and equal voting rights, and Verizon has agreed to pay BT roughly 625 million dollars to balance the value each side is contributing. The venture will be headquartered in the United Kingdom, though technically incorporated in Jersey, and a former telecoms executive, Martijn Blanken, has been named as its incoming chief executive once the deal closes, expected sometime in 2027.
For BT, the logic is straightforward. Running a sprawling international network on its own had become an expensive distraction from its core British business, where the real profits lie. By pooling resources with Verizon, BT gets scale without having to carry the full cost, and it can redirect management attention and capital back toward broadband and mobile services at home. It is, in effect, an admission that going it alone internationally no longer makes sense in a world where multinational clients want a single, AI-ready network that spans continents.
Even so, Kirkby’s challenges are far from over. As BT marks its 180th anniversary this year, the competitive landscape at home has grown noticeably tougher. The merger of Vodafone and Three has created a powerful new mobile rival with the scale to compete aggressively on price and network coverage. At the same time, a wave of smaller “alt-net” broadband providers has been chipping away at BT’s fibre market share in towns and cities across the country, undercutting on price even as BT pours money into laying cable. As the company’s fibre rollout nears completion, Kirkby must answer a harder question, namely what BT actually stands for once the building phase is over and the business shifts into a slower, more competitive growth phase.
There have also been governance tensions closer to home. Sunil Bharti Mittal, the Indian telecoms billionaire who is now BT’s largest shareholder, has taken a board seat and is reportedly pushing Kirkby and chairman Adam Crozier for stronger performance, particularly around market share, which has continued to slip in key segments. A recent rebrand and a significant clear-out of the boardroom have added to a sense of flux rather than settling nerves.
On the international side, the Verizon venture still needs regulatory clearance in multiple jurisdictions before it can close, and integrating two large, previously separate operations is rarely simple. There is also a broader question of how much genuine growth the new venture can generate once cost savings from combining the businesses have been captured, since neither BT nor Verizon is treating this as an aggressive expansion play so much as a tidying up of assets that had become hard to justify running independently.
Kirkby’s supporters argue she inherited good timing along with a difficult job, taking over just as BT’s heaviest spending was behind it. Her critics say the turnaround so far has largely confirmed a strategy already in motion rather than charting a genuinely new course. What is not in dispute is that the easy part, cutting costs and reassuring the market, is largely done. The harder task, proving that a 180-year-old telecoms giant can still grow in a crowded and fast-changing global market, is only just beginning.
Image Credit: BT