How BT’s ‘no nonsense’ first female chief helped turn company around

Allison Kirkby took home £5.6m in pay and bonuses last year. Photograph: Lluís Gené/AFP/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Allison Kirkby took home £5.6m in pay and bonuses last year. Photograph: Lluís Gené/AFP/Getty Images How BT’s ‘no nonsense’ first female chief helped turn company around The firm’s share price has risen 80% under Allison Kirkby’s leadership – but pressure remains for her to deliver further growth If timing is everything, then Allison Kirkby may have judged it perfectly. Since becoming BT’s first female chief executive more than two years ago the company’s share price has climbed 80%, an investor-pleasing turnaround that has seen Kirkby well-rewarded with a pay and bonus package of £5.6m last year , the largest for a boss of the telecoms company in well over a decade. However, there are questions over how much credit Kirkby can take for the apparent revival of the business. Last week, the 58-year-old Glaswegian, who joined BT’s board in 2019 while chief executive of Swedish telecoms company Telia, received plaudits for finally engineering a solution to deal with the group’s struggling international division . The division has been a drag on BT for years and an exit – to focus on making the company a “national champion” – has been tortuously trickling along since a scandal at BT Italia wiped more than £8bn off its market value a decade ago and ultimately cost the former chief executive Gavin Patterson his job. And as years of huge investment in addressing the UK’s status as a global internet laggard taper off, full-fibre broadband now covers more than two-thirds of the UK and BT could be churning out £3bn in annual free cashflow by the end of the decade. The need for fewer engineers and the rollout of AI will see BT’s workforce shrink by about 40% to about 75,000 by the end of the decade, with Kirkby last month raising the company’s savings target from £3bn to £3.7bn. However, there are those who believe that the foundations for much of the benefit that Kirkby is now reaping were laid by her predecessor, Philip Jansen. Jansen’s tenure has been characterised as that of a wartime general , from instigating only the third dividend cut in BT’s history to pay for the national infrastructure upgrade, while also facing a pandemic and the company’s first national strike in 35 years, to huge staff and cost cuts and off-loading the costly BT Sport pay-TV business. “I think she inherited a good hand with a lot of good fundamentals in place; some might say she has been a lucky general, but she has also been a driving force,” says one former senior executive. “She is no-nonsense, a clever operator, and subsequent decisions have been smart. And she is still facing plenty of challenges.” BT pension scheme lost £300m on Thames Water stake Read more Sunil Bharti Mittal, the Indian telecoms billionaire who is BT’s largest shareholder , and another senior executive from his company have taken seats on BT’s board. While Kirkby does not need to