Priceline.com Ousts President, Restructures at the Top

Priceline.com, Norwalk, CT, has fired its president and CEO, Daniel H. Schulman, as part of a management restructuring. He is being replaced as CEO by chairman Richard S. Braddock.

Jeffery H. Boyd was named to replace Schulman as the name-your-own-price Internet company’s president.

The news comes despite the company’s better-than-expected first quarter results last week on a broad-based turnaround, but after the once high-flying dot-com had sustained a slide in revenues and nearly 90% decline in its stock price since last year.

Braddock said the company had made enough progress in its turnaround plan that it could now operate with two senior executives rather than three. “I think it was just more the efficiency of having a more limited number of cooks,” Braddock said.

Braddock previously served as the company’s acting CEO from July 1998 to May 2000. He will continue to serve as chairman of Priceline’s board of directors.

Boyd has served as priceline.com’s COO since October 2000 and previously was executive vice president and general counsel.

Schulman joined the company in June 1999 after 18 years at AT&T Corp., where he was and executive vice president and head of the consumer markets division.

The company remains confident it will achieve pro forma profits in the second quarter, Braddock said.

Priceline last week reported its first-quarter net loss totaled $13.8 million. The results before unusual items beat analyst expectations, but revenues and gross profits were down from the year-ago quarter.

Heidi Miller, considered one of the most powerful women executives in the United States, who was formerly at Citigroup, left Priceline last November. In addition, the company’s founder, Jay Walker, departed at end of 2000 to focus on his personal business activities.