Sheldon Bruha, Director
Sheldon Bruha is a global finance executive with 30+ years of financial and operational leadership experience in complex, multi-billion US, UK and Latin American companies. He is accomplished in business turnarounds, corporate restructurings, and driving growth through business transformations, efficient capital allocation and M&A. During 2022-2024 he has served as Chief Financial Officer for Millicom, a telecommunications company providingmobile (including data, voice and mobile financial services) and fixed (broadband, data, voice and pay-TV services) to consumers and businesses in 9 Latin American countries, with ~$6 billion in revenue. During 2018-2021, Mr. Bruha was CFO at Frontier Communications, overseeing strategic management of the financial activities of one of the largest fixed-line communication providers in the U.S., with ~$7 billion in revenues across 25 states. Frontier provides broadband, data, voice and video services via fiber- and copper-based technologies to consumers, businesses and other telecom carriers.
At Millicom (NASDAQ: TIGO), Mr. Bruha oversaw a comprehensive, company-wide cost efficiency program that grew to $250 million of EBITDA benefits from initial $100 million ambition, addressing: headcount and salary levels, content costs, operational simplification, size of Miami headquarters via decentralization, opex spending controls and capex optimization. Concurrently, he addressed the group’s excessive leverage that accumulated from ~$2.5 billion of acquisitions prior to his arrival via (i) prioritizing capital allocation to debt reduction, (ii) $750 million equity rights offering, (iii) open market debt repurchases at discounts, and (iv) the $250 million cost-efficiency program; thereby putting the company on trajectory to decrease leverage from peak of 3.4x to targeted 2.5x in 30 month period. Throughout his Millicom tenure, Mr. Bruha managed through significant stakeholder uncertainty, including protracted take-private discussions with Apollo Global Management and the accumulation of an influential ownership stake from an activist / industrialist shareholder.
At Frontier (NASDAQ: FYBR), Mr. Bruha oversaw an unprecedented financial restructuring. Frontier had aggressively grown during 2010-2016 via a series of acquisitions that resulted in several integration challenges, financial and operational under-performance, and an overstretched balance sheet. During his first year at Frontier, Mr. Bruha extended the company’s financial flexibility by refinancing and/or up-tiering over $3.5 billion of debt, amending credit facilities, suspending the common-stock dividend, selling $1.4 billion of assets, and implementing a $250 million transformation and efficiency program. As it became evident that such steps would be insufficient to enable a return to sustainable financial health, Mr. Bruha led one of the largest-ever telecommunications balance sheet restructurings. Implemented through a pre-arranged bankruptcy filing, the restructuring reduced debt by $11 billion and interest expense by $1 billion. Throughout the balance sheet restructuring, Mr. Bruha navigated an extremely challenging and diverse group of stakeholders including a newly appointed Finance Committee of the Board, a newly appointed CEO, unsecured noteholders, multiple debtor and creditor financial advisors, and DIP lenders. Concurrent with the balance sheet restructuring, Mr. Bruha helped develop the future capital allocation strategy of the business, emphasizing the attractive financial returns of using the newly established financial flexibility to invest in a $2.5 billion fiber upgrade of existing copper DSL broadband infrastructure. Mr. Bruha then led the reintroduction of Frontier to the capital markets, firstly with the debt markets and rating agencies via refinancing all $5 billion of the reinstated secured debt in the fourth quarter of 2020, and secondly with the equity markets via the company’s re-listing on NASDAQ in April 2021 upon the emergence from bankruptcy.
Prior to joining Frontier, Mr. Bruha held several senior financial leadership roles at Cable & Wireless, including head of corporate development where he led a strategic transformation and re-shaping of the company via the disposal of 21 businesses amounting to $1.9 billion, and the subsequent acquisition of three key new businesses for $3.3 billion, positioning the company for its subsequent sale to Liberty Latin America. He also held senior financial leadership roles at CDI Corp., where he strengthened the company’s balance sheet flexibility, repositioned its product portfolio via a series of acquisitions and disposals, and evaluated strategic alternatives in the face of shareholder activism, culminating in the sale of the company to a private equity fund.
Mr. Bruha started his financial career at Lehman Brothers, the global investment bank, and held senior investment banking positions in its New York and London offices, focusing on the telecommunications industry.
During his financial career, Mr. Bruha has operated in diverse economic, business, and cultural environments having been based in the global financial centers of New York and London and having been involved in operations and boards of national Latin American operators of Millicom, small island nations of Cable & Wireless and rural businesses of Frontier. He has managed investment strategies and capital allocation, analyzing organic and inorganic investment opportunities/trade-offs with a focused return-on-investment criteria. He has extensive strategic development experience, tying together business strategy, financing strategy, capital allocation, and equity story/investor communications.
Mr. Bruha is an honors graduate of Washington University in St. Louis with a bachelor’s degree in business administration.