Channel Managers Impacted as Sprint Lays Off Hundreds

Sprint says it is laying off 829 workers at its Overland Park, Kansas, headquarters.

Layoffs have been expected since early October when the carrier announced a $2.5 billion cost-cutting plan. The telco will announce its latest quarterly earnings on Tuesday.

A notice filed with the Kansas Department of Commerce confirmed the workforce reductions from across the organization, and covers notification for reductions in the past 90 days.

Bloomberg on Monday reported, citing a “person familiar with the situation,” that the number of jobs being eliminated is actually three times that number — approximately 2,500, or 7 percent of the carrier’s workforce. The Kansas City Star reported that six call centers will shut down and that about 2,000 employees will be impacted.

Michelle Boyd, Sprint spokeswoman, tells Channel Partners that the company is in the “middle of a multiyear turnaround strategy.”

“We are radically transforming how we do business and are laser-focused on creating a superior network, being the price leader in the wireless industry and providing a positive customer experience,” she said. “We are making progress and our business is heading in the right direction.”{ad}

The transformation requires changing Sprint’s cost structure and reallocating resources “so we can fuel our growth and operate more efficiently,” Boyd said.

“We are in the process of significantly taking costs out of the business so the transformation of the company will be sustainable for the long term,” she said. “We are leaving no stone unturned as we work to eliminate up to $2.5 billion of costs from our business. Unfortunately, as we’ve said over the past several months, the effort to reduce our costs would impact all areas of our business, including jobs.”

The layoffs are affecting application developers, channel managers, business sales negotiators, IT account managers, pricing managers, systems integrators, telecom design engineers and many others. 

“Job reductions are never an easy thing to do and we don’t make these decisions lightly,” Boyd said. “We believe the steps we are taking to transform our business will help us deliver an even stronger customer experience and help build a sustainable business for the foreseeable future.”

Phil Cusick, an analyst with JPMorgan Chase & Co., wrote in a note last week that Sprint is “slowly improving; perhaps not quickly enough to get out of the way of the balance sheet but we don’t see any near-term liquidity issues.”

According to the Department of Commerce filing, all of the layoffs will be permanent, meaning there will be no right of recall, and Sprint does not have a “bumping” policy. None of the affected employees is represented by a union, it said.