David Thodey and Andy Penn
David Thodey will retire as CEO of Telstra on 1st May and will be replaced by current CFO Andy Penn.
David Thodey who is 60 was born in Perth and educated in New Zealand. He was recruited from IBM to Telstra in April 2001 as Group Managing Director of Mobiles. He went on to head up Telstra Enterprise and Government from December 2002 and was appointed as CEO in May 2009 following the turbulent reign of Sol Trujillo.
David Thodey normalised the government relationship and more than doubled the value of the company in his years at the helm through some astute deals most notably the $11Bn NBN and NBN2 arrangements.
In the mobile space David Thodey built on the excellent network quality NextG legacy left by Trujillo continuing to spend to improve speed, coverage and capacity with 4G LTE and more recently 700MHz Carrier Aggregation 4GX. With this strategy Telstra has been able to increase its mobile market share (from 41.4% in 2009 to 52.2% today) while pricing at a premium over Optus and Vodafone.