Sprint to reduce costs by $2.5 billion over the next six months, additional job cuts "inevitable"

[Shawn Knight]

Sprint is preparing to lay off additional workers as it seeks to reduce its costs by as much as $2.5 billion over the next six months. Tarek Robbiati, Sprint’s chief financial officer, announced the plan in a memo to staff this week according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

Robbiati said the cost reductions have forced the company to implement an external hiring freeze and will also inevitably result in job reductions. Sprint had around 31,000 people on its payroll at the end of March; the executive didn’t estimate how many jobs might be lost as part of the process.

Elsewhere, those seeking to use company funds must now have purchases reviewed and approved. Robbiati said he wants employees to take an owner’s mindset by treating every dollar as if it were their own when requesting to spend money.

Over the past year, Sprint has trimmed $1.5 billion in expenses from its budget. Even still, the carrier accumulated $7.5 billion in operating expenses during the three-month period ending June 30, the Journal noted.

Sprint was on track to acquire rival service provider T-Mobile last summer but ultimately decided to abandon those plans over regulatory concerns. The company also made the decision to replace longtime CEO Dan Hesse with Brightstar chief Marcelo Claure who has been leading the turnaround ever since.

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[MilwaukeeMike]

Poor sprint... back when cell phones took off they were on top because they had a network that allowed for clearer phone calls than it's rivals. When smartphones became popular they were always the one to carry the latest and greatest.

Then rivals built up their network to use this thing called 'Four Gee' and people started to wonder why they were paying the same high prices for a network that crawled along at the pace of a 56k modem.

When I switched from Sprint to T-Mobile, I got a new phone on no contract, my connection was like 10 times faster, and it still cost like $30/month less, and that's only because I was paying monthly for my phone. Otherwise it would have been even cheaper. The only downside is a smaller network, for those few hours a year I'm driving between cities.