HANGING-UP time is fast-approaching for Philip Jansen, whose plan to step down as CEO of BT Group next year - revealed by me last weekend - was confirmed on Monday.

Sources have told me that Jansen has been approached about several jobs with big US technology companies. The defection of another big corporate name across the Atlantic might underscore the point - made recently by Julia Hoggett, the London Stock Exchange chief - that British companies are falling behind their American counterparts on boardroom pay.

But it will also come as BT faces the biggest threat to its independence since it was privatised in 1984.

Friends of Jansen say he has been left frustrated at a share price which now stands at little more than half the 230p it traded at on February 1, 2019, his first day in the job.

Rightly, that serves as investors' principal benchmark of any CEO's tenure: so by that reckoning, his stint might be deemed a failure.

Yet the headwinds into which Jansen has faced - Covid-19 and soaring costs driven by inflation - and the foundations laid for the longterm health of the company suggest that BT's share price performance masks the real value of his legacy.

Cancelling the dividend for 18 months and rebasing it at half its previous level was a bold thing to do, and an act of corporate bravery that should ultimately be viewed as being in the national interest.

Jansen's £15bn programme to build Britain's digital infrastructure - "like fury", in his words - while trying to improve BT's shoddy customer service and investment in 5G has been a tough one to pull off in the public markets. Longtermism of this kind has become worryingly rare in FTSE-100 boardrooms, particularly since a pandemic which forced substantial balance sheet reinforcement and dividend cuts.

Couple that with Jansen's growing disenchantment, fomented under the previous chair, Jan du Plessis, and culminating in the bizarre rebuke he received from Ofcom for predicting that the proliferation of altnets building fibre infrastructure "will end in tears".

All this might explain why Deutsche Telekom, the German communications giant which owns a 12 per cent stake in BT, is reported to be circling its British peer.

Deutsche CEO Tim Hottges said earlier this year that his investment in the company - struck in 2015 as part of its sale of EE, the mobile operator, to BT - was his "biggest mistake".

That statement was typically clever sophistry.

Whether the government would allow any foreign takeover of BT is debatable, but don't be surprised if Jansen's departure opens a window for Hottges, or Altice's Patrick Drahi, to try to prise open.

(c) 2023 City A.M., source Newspaper