New Swisscom CEO Christoph Aeschlimann is looking for a way out of the hamster wheel

The era with Urs Schaeppi at the head of the telecom group ends on a happy note. The largest construction site of the successor Christoph Aeschlimann is in Switzerland.

The 45-year-old head of technology Christoph Aeschlimann will take over the Swisscom post in June.

Christian Beutler / Keystone

It’s over in a month. Urs Schaeppi was CEO of Swisscom for nine years. In June, Christoph Aeschlimann will take over the helm. The Schaeppi era seems to end on a reasonably forgiving note. That was not necessarily to be expected. The career fall was overshadowed by several network breakdowns. The situation has calmed down recently. Apparently, Swisscom has found its way back to stability.

That was also urgently needed. The image as a quality leader was the result of years of work. This was battered by the power failures within a very short time. As a result, the remarkable operational performance was almost forgotten. Since 2017, sales in Switzerland have fallen by 900 million francs. Thanks to a savings program – including the reduction of 1800 full-time positions – the operating profit (Ebitda) was stabilized at 3.5 billion francs. That may not sound particularly sexy. For a group that is defending its high market shares in a saturated market, this is quite acceptable.

Swisscom reliably distributes dividends of CHF 1.1 billion per year to shareholders. The flourishing Italian subsidiary Fastweb also makes this possible. At some point, however, the low-hanging fruit will be picked in the neighboring country. Christoph Aeschlimann must therefore push ahead with the conversion of Swisscom in Switzerland into an ICT group. This is not an easy task. After almost every quarter, the “blue giant” emphasizes that business customers’ demand for cloud and security solutions has increased. As far as sales are concerned, however, Swisscom has been more or less stationary in the solutions business for years.

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