Verizon Consumer Group CEO to Step Down
Sowmyanarayan Sampath had been considered a likely future CEO.
WASHINGTON, Feb. 5, 2026 – Sowmyanarayan Sampath, CEO of Verizon’s consumer group, is stepping down at the end of the first quarter of 2026, the company announced Thursday.
The announcement comes days after the Financial Times reported Verizon was looking for potential replacements for Sampath, who was previously seen as a likely future CEO, as new Verizon CEO Dan Schulman seeks to shake up the wireless carrier.
Alfonso Villanueva, Verizon’s executive vice president and chief transformation officer, will take over for Sampath on an interim basis, the company said.
In a public note to employees, Schulman said Verizon was “at a critical inflection point, improving our customer experience and bringing greater intensity to how we execute.”
“Alfonso will fully immerse himself in the customer experience and core convergence initiatives, offering an important level of alignment between transformation strategy and operational execution,” he added. “These changes will accelerate our transformation by allowing us to move faster and deliver improvements our customers will feel.”
The FT’s report came as a surprise given Sampath's “'heir apparent' status and the short duration of now-CEO Dan Schulman's existing contract,” which goes through 2027, New Street Research analyst David Barden said in a research note Tuesday. “Our view is that even more change, and therefore uncertainty, in the wireless industry C-suite is not a positive for the sector. Verizon has a lot of wood to chop to make good on ambitious '26E guidance and introduce a new 'value proposition' in the first half. Turmoil at the top complicates this mission.”
Villanueva was an executive at PayPal for nine years, while Schulman was CEO of the company.
Schulman, appointed abruptly in October, is looking to make the company leaner and compete more fiercely for mobile subscribers and regain ground from AT&T and T-Mobile. That’s involved cutting more than 13,000 jobs so far, the company’s largest round of layoffs.
The carrier did post better-than-expected postpaid phone net adds in the fourth quarter of 2025, counting 616,000 new additions compared to the 466,000 Wall Street had predicted.
Verizon also recently closed its $20 billion acquisition of Frontier, adding 9 million locations to the company’s fiber footprint. That’s important for the company’s plan, which Schulman is on board with, to bundle fixed and mobile broadband in a bid to reduce subscriber churn.
“The more I look at convergence, the more optimistic I am that that’s going to be a major part of our future,” Schulman said on Verizon’s Jan. 30 earnings call. “So we want to double down on that.”
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