Sprint says it’s cutting 2,000 more jobs, reducing staff 5%
Wireless carrier Sprint Corp. says it is eliminating 2,000 jobs, or about 5% of its staff, as part of an effort to cut $1.5 billion in annual spending.
The company said the cuts will be made over the coming weeks and months, and it is still determining how many jobs will be cut from various divisions. Sprint announced a separate round of job cuts in early October, and did not say how many jobs were eliminated at that time. Sprint said Monday that job cuts would reduce its labor costs by a combined $400 million per year.
The Overland Park, Kan., company is the third-largest cellphone carrier in the U.S., but it has lost billions of dollars in recent years as subscribers canceled contracts and is trying to compete better with AT&T and Verizon.
Japan’s Softbank bought a majority stake in Sprint in 2013 and the company has eliminated thousands of jobs since then. It had 38,000 employees at the end of last year.
Sprint is also making changes at the top, in August replacing former Chief Executive Dan Hesse with Marcelo Claure, CEO of cellphone distributor Brightstar, a unit of Softbank.
That came after Sprint ended its effort to buy competitor T-Mobile US.
The company’s losses haven’t ended. Sprint said Monday that it lost $765 million, or 19 cents a share, in its fiscal second quarter on $8.49 billion in revenue. Zacks Investment Research says analysts expected a loss of 5 cents a share and $8.65 billion in revenue.
Sprint shares, which closed Monday at $6.20, down 27 cents, slid an additional 47 cents, or 7.6%, to $5.73 in after-hours trading. The shares have dropped 42% this year.
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