T-Mobile last week entered into an amended employment agreement with President and CEO Mike Sievert that extends his tenure by five years.
The new agreement replaces the prior employment agreement between T-Mobile and Sievert that was dated November 15, 2019, and extends his contract through April 1, 2028, subject to automatic one-year extensions thereafter unless at least 90 days’ prior notice of non-renewal is given by either party.
According to the March 10 filing with the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), Sievert’s annual base salary is $1.75 million, and that was effective January 1, 2023. He’s entitled to annual long-term incentive awards of no less than $18.5 million, which will be allocated through stocks. In April, the plan also provides a one-time award in stock worth $10 million.
Sievert became T-Mobile president and CEO on May 1, 2020, as part of a multi-year succession planning process, replacing John Legere. Prior to that, Sievert was chief operating officer and chief marketing officer at T-Mobile. Earlier in his career, he was chief commercial officer at Clearwire.
“Objectively, Mike is doing a very good job,” said Recon Analytics founder Roger Entner. “They’re beating and exceeding their goals. They have very good fundamentals and they have a good plan behind it.”
T-Mobile is increasing profitability, growing its customer base and churn has greatly improved, he added. “I’m sure Verizon and AT&T regret that they didn’t fight the merger harder – or they didn’t fight the merger at all.”
T-Mobile’s MetroPCS acquisition was a good playbook for the Sprint integration, especially compared to Verizon’s more recent TracFone acquisition, he said. “T-Mobile has done a very good job with Sprint,” which was no slam dunk, especially considering the disastrous merger between Sprint and Nextel Communications.
Sievert actually makes a bigger salary than the CEO of parent company Deutsche Telekom, Timotheus Höttges, Entner noted.
Next in line?
Given the latest contract agreement, T-Mobile will have plenty of time to groom a successor to Sievert. Likely inside candidates are Consumer Group President Jon Freier, Business Group President Callie Field and Marketing President Mike Katz, “and probably in that order,” Entner said.
Of course, Legere & company famously promised the merger with Sprint would be “jobs-positive from Day One and every day thereafter.” T-Mobile had about 80,000 workers when it closed the Sprint acquisition in April 2020 and ended 2021 with about 75,000 workers, the Wall Street Journal reported last year.
“The deal that T-Mobile got from the merger is unbelievably good,” Entner said. “It was perfectly obvious there wouldn’t be more jobs” and that Dish would struggle.
“The conditions that they [the government] did was like a fig leaf,” giving the appearance that there would be four facilities-based carriers still standing. For Dish, "their window of success is getting smaller," he said.