Job cuts expected
As part of a massive overhaul of the country’s No. 4carrier, Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure announced plans to restructure the company, which will see the company split into four regional offices and include job cuts.
Bloomberg obtained a memo from Claure to Sprint employees announcing the layoffs. “For our colleagues who will be leaving, we will be sorry to see them go,” Claure said in the memo. “These are actions that we must take so that we can ensure the strength and long-term success of our company, and save thousands of other jobs.”
The new decentralized approach is part of Claure’s effort to reverse a seven-year streak of subscriber losses and better serve the carrier’s customers in 19 major U.S. markets.
The four new regions will have a president who will report directly to Claure. Each of the 19 key markets will also have a president. The plan also includes a more united sales approach, which will target Sprint’s entire customer base as opposed to its current strategy of dividing the sales team into separate channels.
“We are going to go from a centralized model that we have today to a completely local decentralized model,” Claure said last week in an interview. “You’ll see 19 Sprints. We are going to go fight in the local markets rather than one Sprint fighting from Overland Park.”
So far, there is no word on how many jobs will be eliminated, but one report says the cuts could begin Jan. 30, 2016. The company has a goal of cutting $2.5 billion from its annual budget of more than $20 billion.
As part of the cuts, Sprint also announced it would be adjusting severance packages for the employee. The Overland Park, Kansas-based carrier formerly offered two weeks severance of full pay for each year of employment; that is apparently getting cut back to one week of pay for each year worked, a 50% reduction of benefits.
In spite of all this, Sprint has seen some positive signs over the past few quarters. The carrier added high-value smartphone customers in its most recent fiscal quarter, which stemmed a long-slide of customer defections that earlier this year resulted in the carrier being surpassed by T-Mobile US as the nation’s No. 3 operator in terms of customer base. Sprint also managed to post more than 1 million net connection additions to its network during the quarter, which was just short of the 1.2 million direct connections added by Verizon Wireless and less than half of the total connections posted byAT&T Mobility and T-Mobile US.
On Saturday, Claure tweeted about the company’s work on new pricing plans, which will be announced on Wednesday.
