HawTel replaces CEO with turnaround specialist

Hawai­ian Tel­com CEO Mike Ruley was dis­missed yes­ter­day. His replace­ment is Stephen Cooper, co-founder or Kroll Zolfo Cooper, a New York City-based interim man­age­ment firm. Cooper is best known as the Enron’s CEO dur­ing the company’s bank­ruptcy. Today’s Star-Bulletin arti­cle has a brief biog­ra­phy of Cooper. Kevin Nys­trom, a senior direc­tor at KZC, will join Haw­Tel as COO.

While Cooper stated in today’s Hon­olulu Adver­tiser that Haw­Tel is not a “dis­tressed com­pany”, it’s now clear that the Car­lyle Group is unhappy with their acquisition’s per­for­mance. Haw­Tel has lost thou­sands of sub­scribers to mobile car­ri­ers and Time Warner Oceanic’s VoIP ser­vices, lead­ing to US$137 mil­lion in finan­cial losses since 2006. I men­tioned some of the oper­a­tional issues on my old blog on 16 Novem­ber 2006, and last week Busi­ness­Week dis­cussed how mar­ket forces have affected the US tele­com indus­try overall.

The Adver­tiser noted that Ruley put his Kahala home on the mar­ket in early Jan­u­ary, which is a pos­si­ble indi­ca­tion that changes were com­ing at Haw­Tel. The com­pany has elim­i­nated over 100 man­age­ment posi­tions since Octo­ber 2007.

Tagged as: businessweek, business_model, car, ceo, content, cxo, Hawaii, Hawaiian, Hawaiian-Telcom, Honolulu, management, mobile, new-york, ocean, telecom, time, Time-Warner-Cable, USA, VoIP, Wikipedia