Business Case Studies & Business Publications

The SimpleTel Dilemma

Venkataraman, S., ...

Case

The SimpleTel Dilemma

Venkataraman, S.; Nair, Prasad; Narayanan, Rajesh

E-0299 | Published December 31, 2007 | 11 pages Case

Collection: Darden School of Business

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Until recently, SimpleTel had been a star performer in the telecom industry, and the CEO had been a darling of the analyst community. Several years back, SimpleTel's found itself in a situation where customers were migrating to smaller, local telecom providers to avoid the congestion on SimpleTel's network. At that point, SimpleTel's leadership had decided to invest heavily in expanding network capacity. But now the company was left with a huge amount of unutilized capacity. That, along with debt obligations related to the massive investments in capacity, and lack of demand was threatening to push SimpleTel to the verge of bankruptcy. The previously celebrated CEO had fallen out of favor and shareholders were baying for his blood. He was forced to make an unceremonious departure, and the search for a savior had begun. Today, the compensation committee was due to deliberate on the compensation package for SimpleTel's new chief executive.