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The news is looking worse and worse for Sprint as each day passes on. The company reportedly has major cuts in line to become a more sustainable company for the future. The cuts include $2.5 billion in operating expenses, and there are likely to be some jobs lost in the process.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Sprint is so adamant about cutting costs that all transactions made by every branch of the company has to be approved by the financial department, and Sprint has supposedly outright frozen outside hiring.
These sorts of cuts are typical for a company whose goal is to become more sustainable, but considering Sprint’s situation as of late it looks like more of a desperation move to make sure their value doesn’t dissipate to an embarrassing level. They’ve been the only major US carrier consistently losing consumers over the past couple of years, with T-Mobile having passed them up to become the nation’s 3rd largest carrier.
A Sprint spokesperson revealed to Reuters that it’s too early to discuss exact details of where cuts will be made and how many jobs will be affected.
The company’s network could shoulder a lot of the blame for allowing themselves to fall to the bottom of the barrel. 4G performance was always decent, but only decent And there was one point in time where the 3G network was so congested that it became hard to load simple webpages.
Only in the past couple of years have they made significant strides to turn that around and improve their image in the eyes of consumers, but T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T are moving just as fast.
It was nice for Sprint to be able to say they were the first carrier with “proper” 4G (the now-defunct WiMax network), and one of the only standing carriers to offer truly unlimited data, but it’s no longer 2009 and no one cares that they were the first — they only care about who is the best.
Consumers consider network performance to be the most telling sign of a quality carrier, and numbers have proven that a majority of folks would rather go with the companies who have all their ducks in a row even if they have to pay a high premium and give up luxuries such as unlimited data for it.
Gimmick promotions and slick advertising can only go so far, so Sprint will have to figure out a way to attract the dollar signs they need to stay competitive in the highly volatile and competitive US market. Otherwise, don’t be surprised if Softbank considers unloading them just as quickly as they snapped them up.
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