In a bit of shocker today, T-Mobile’s CEO Philipp Humm has announced that he has stepped down effective immediately. Deutsche TeleKom (DT), T-Mobile USA’s parent company said that Humm has left the company to pursue other interests outside of Deutsche Telekom and he is returning to Germany to be with his family.
Humm, who was with with DT as an executive, took over the role as CEO of T-Mobile USA in 2010, his job was to stop the purging of customers and help T-Mobile USA regain a foot hold in the US. However, during his entire tenure with T-Mobile, Humm saw T-Mobile on the losing side every quarter. Last year, it would have seemed that Humm may have made a home run when he helped negotiate a deal with AT&T, which would see the nation’s second largest wireless carrier absorb T-Mobile, Federal regulators (and Sprint) put a stop to that, as they thought it would lessen competition within the US.
Now T-Mobile sits as the last of the big carriers trying to put together a game plan for its next-generation wireless network. Sprint, the nations third largest carrier, is set to kick off their first few LTE cities in July, which is way ahead of T-Mobile who only just finalized a deal with Verizon to buy AWS spectrum and still has to wait for approval, further delaying their LTE launch.
With no explanation as to why Humm felt compiled to leave, one can only assume that the writing is on the wall, there’s no way out for T-Mobile and Humm didn’t want to be the captain going down with the ship. Is that the case? We don’t know, but it sure as hell seems fishy. While I’d like to ask T-Mobile for a statement, we all know we won’t get a straight answer, we’ll get the same typical PR spin about how “The company is changing and planning for the future and with the newly acquired (unofficially) AWS spectrum, T-Mobile is aligning itself for the success of the future, blah, blah, blah.
Use your brain people.
(Photo Credit: LA Times)