It’s official: Dan Hesse gets the boot as Sprint names Marcelo Claure new CEO
Yesterday, we learned Sprint would be looking to back out of the bidding war for T-Mobile, and that they’d also be looking to get rid of Dan Hesse as CEO. The second half of that news was made official today as the Now Network has announced that they’ve named Marcelo Claure as the new chief executive officer of the company.
Claure is credited as the founder of Brightstar, a top Florida-based telecommunications company that was acquired by Softbank (Sprint’s new owner) in October of last year. Claure has been working with Sprint manangement in the past few months to help shape the company’s growth path. It sounds like he was being groomed for the spot for quite a bit of time, though that’s usually how it works with these high level management changes.
Dan Hesse spearheaded an ambitious 4G movement and stuck to his guns on unlimited data while the industry transitioned to tiered plans, though struggling network performance and a lack of consistent growth has seemingly overshadowed the bit of good he’s done. It’s even more troubling for the company that T-Mobile has potential to surpass them within the next few years with their Uncarrier movement.
Claure says the company’s focus going forward will to work on making the carrier “extremely cost efficient” and becoming a lot more competitive in the market. Whether that means a vastly improved network or groundbreaking perks like T-Mobile seems to throw out like candy remains to be seen, but their decision to back out of the bidding war for Magenta confirms they’ll be focusing on fixing themselves before trying to swallow up others.
“While consolidating makes sense in the long-term, for now, we will focus on growing and repositioning Sprint,” said Claure. That particular line leaves the door open for future dialog about acquisitions, but it looks like Sprint won’t be bothered with that in the here and now. That certainly seems to be the best way to go, and we’re sure many T-Mobile fans couldn’t be happier to hear it.
[via Sprint]