- Schulman wanted to emphasize 4 main things at Verizon in 2026, including delivering ROI for investors
- He said Verizon's culture needed "shaking up"
- He's pretty thrilled about the opportunity to sell dark fiber to hyperscalers
Dan Schulman has been CEO of Verizon for about a year, and he spoke this week at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology 2026 conference about his tenure.
“Time flies when you're having a good time,” he said. “And I would say, in general, I'm pretty pleased with the progress that we've made. It's a big company; those often take time to turn around.”
Schulman said he wanted to emphasize four things over the past year. "The first is I wanted the company to stop being overly engineering focused and really be obsessed with our customer.” He said he would measure the success of that based on whether churn was going down and whether post-paid phone net ads were going up.
“Churn had been going up for three years in a row,” he said. “Now, churn is coming down year over year. I expect that to continue.”
And in its Q2 2026 quarter, Verizon reported 184,000 postpaid phone net additions and more than 550,000 total mobility and broadband net additions. Prepaid net adds were 77,300.
“The second thing is, I really felt like the culture at Verizon needed shaking up,” said Schulman. “We really needed to start to play to win. I'm a pretty intense guy. I'm very impatient.” He noted that Verizon is a big, “bureaucratic,” “hierarchical” company. “It's process-oriented as opposed to results-oriented. It's very risk averse, and we were moving very slowly. I was tired of the company being more prey than predator in the market.”
He said he’s starting to see “intensity” in every meeting he goes to.
His third emphasis this past year was to redefine Verizon’s business model so that it would become “the most efficient telco in the world.”
“You know, in month two, we cut almost 13,000 people,” said Schulman. “I set what people thought were ambitious opex and capex targets. They're really not that ambitious, but $5 billion in opex savings, $4 billion in capex savings.”
The company will, in fact, exit 2026 with over $5 billion in opex savings on a run rate basis. However, it won’t come close to its capex savings this year. Its 2025 capex was $17 billion, and it’s guiding for between $16 billion to $16.5 billion in capex in 2026.
In regard to savings, Schulman mentioned his desire to get away from handset subsidies and redefine the rules of competition by being more fiscally responsible.
His fourth goal for 2026 was “to have real serious returns to our investors.”
He implied the previous CEO had really let the stock price slide over the past five years, going down more than 30%. “We had gone from first in market cap to last in market cap,” said Schulman. “Our forward PE was one of the lowest, if not the lowest, in the industry. And our adjusted EPS free cash flow over the last five years have compounded at negative 1%.”
This year, Verizon has guided to 6% to 7% for adjusted EPS and 9% to 10% on free cash flow.
“So I would say in general, I'm pleased with the direction of travel,” said Schulman. “There's a hell of a lot more that we need to do to reach my expectations. But we're kind of on the right track right now.”
AI and the future at Verizon
At the end of his conversation at Goldman, Schulman talked a bit about the company’s prospects from providing fiber connectivity to hyperscalers for their AI buildouts.
“I have to say I'm actually really excited about the AI infrastructure opportunity for us,” he said. “I mean we're just kind of fortunate on this. We are in the right place at the right time. It opens up a quite large addressable market for us. It's growing quite rapidly, and we have the right assets in place and experience to take advantage of it."
In July, Verizon announced a dark-fiber build with Google worth $1 billion to connect data centers. This week, Verizon signed a $2 billion-plus deal with Corning to supply fiber and supply it with high-density optical fiber and other connectivity products from 2027 to 2032.
Schulman concluded, “We've been the leaders in both metro and long-haul fiber build. We have a lot of dark fiber capability.”
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