The biggest challenges ahead for Optus' new CEO Stephen Rue
Optus' incoming chief executive faces a daunting task keeping his parent company happy while turning around what was recently named Australia's least trusted brand.
When Stephen Rue was appointed chief executive of the NBN Co in 2018, it was viewed by many in the telecoms industry as a repair job. NBN Co was still bleeding cash and the national broadband network it was constructing was not yet complete following repeated delays and cost overruns.
Nearly six years on, the NBN is in a much better place. But now Rue is taking on arguably an even bigger challenge. Regional telecom titan Singtel has chosen him to run its Australian offshoot Optus, at a challenging time for Australia's second ranked carrier.
Optus was recently named the country's least trusted brand by Roy Morgan Research, beating out Meta and Qantas for the dubious honour of the top spot on the list. The company suffered immense brand damage in 2022 when a hack exposed the details of as many as 10 million customers.
Former CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin was criticised for her handling of the incident. The spectre of the 2022 hack continues to linger above Optus, with the privacy watchdog’s inquiry into its handling of customer data ongoing and a software issue last November causing a day-long outage for millions of customers (and reminding everyone of what happened a year before). Bayer Rosmarin resigned following the outage.
