Sprint cuts 4,000 more jobs
NEW YORK -- Sprint Nextel s, struggling to keep afloat amid a crush of customer defections, is cutting 4,000 jobs.
The reduction announced on Friday is the first of what is expected to be a series of moves by the new CEO, Dan Hesse, as he tries to save the troubled wireless carrier. Sprint in January 2007 announced it was cutting 5,000 jobs. The company has 60,000 employees.
Most shocking to Wall Street, however, was the scale of customer losses: 885,000 during the fourth quarter alone.
Most of the losses came from the Nextel side of the company, said Jan Dawson, an analyst at Ovum. In its news release, Sprint did not break down the customer losses by brand.
Sprint said it lost 683,000 "post-paid," or subscription customers, and 202,000 prepaid customers during the quarter, which is traditionally the strongest for cellphone carriers.
Last year, Sprint lost 1.2 million customers. "It's going to be worse in 2008," predicted UBS analyst John Hodulik.
Sprint's "churn" — shorthand for the number of people who drop off each month — was also ugly: 2.3%. Verizon's churn is almost half that, 1.2%; AT&T isn't far behind.
Hodulik's assessment: "Sprint is losing market share, to put it mildly."
As for those 4,000 job cuts, "It's a good start." Hodulik predicted that more cuts would be needed.
Sprint, the No. 3 wireless carrier behind AT&T t and Verizon Wireless vz, has struggled since it merged with Nextel in 2005. The $70 billion merger, engineered by Hesse's predecessor, Gary Forsee, was supposed to create a wireless behemoth that could steamroll the competition while pushing boundaries in wireless.
Instead, Sprint stumbled as it tried to blend starkly different cultures of the two companies while trying to reconcile their incompatible wireless technologies.
Sprint wound up alienating customers, who bolted by the thousands. Sprint's dismal performance eventually cost Forsee his job. Hesse, a former AT&T executive with long ties to wireless, was recruited from a Sprint spinoff, Embarq, to replace him.
Dawson says it's not too late to save Sprint, a grand name in global telecommunications. "But they need to make some big changes and do it quickly.
"The challenge for them is to figure out how to save the Nextel customers," and move them to Sprint's network "rather than let them walk out the door," Dawson says.
AT&T and Verizon, meantime, continue to add almost 2 million new subscribers each quarter. Many of those new customers are coming from Sprint.
The news pounded Sprint's shares, driving them down almost 25% Friday.
In addition to job cuts, Sprint said it planned to eliminate more than 4,000 third-party distributors and close 125, or 8%, of Sprint-owned retail locations. Sprint noted that it has 20,000 distributors, including 1,400 company-owned stores.
The reductions, Sprint said, should save the company $700 million to $800 million a year by the end of 2008.
Payroll reductions are expected to be completed by midyear, Sprint added.
Sprint's fourth-quarter and 2007 financial results are expected to be reported Feb. 28.