Dish founder Charles Ergen to return as CEO

Dish founder Charles Ergen to return as CEO

Dish Network’s co-founder and chairman Charles Ergen will return as CEO of the company.

The appointment follows the retirement of its present CEO and president Joseph Clayton who will step down on March 31. Clayton, 65, has been CEO of the company since June 2011.

Ergen, 61, stepped down from his role as president and CEO of Dish in 2011 to focus on business development and acquisitions.

“Over the last four years, Joe’s leadership has been instrumental to Dish as we have worked to engineer a fundamental transformation of our business,” said Ergen.

“He has set the stage for what will become a new company, and with that he has prepared a new class of management to address the adventures coming our way.”

Ergen was said to havecontacted Deutsche Telekom about a possible acquisition of T-Mobile US after the deal to merge its US unit with Sprint fell through.

In a bid to stay ahead of its competitors in the pay TV landscape, Dish launched Sling TV earlier this month, an online television service which allows users to stream channels online without satellite service from Dish or any other subscription.

This week, Dish reported its new subscriber activations declining by 2% to 2.6 million from approximately 2.7 million a year ago. In 2014, the company lost about 79,000 pay-TV subscribers and had about 14 million subscribers by the end of the year.




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