For Sprint, the cuts just keep coming. Only a week after it announced it would cut about 100 employees from its wholesale networking division, the struggling integrated wireless/wireline provider is now going to slash 2,000 to 2,500 jobs, or about 5 percent of its employee base, in the hopes of saving $350 million.
This is the second major layoff Sprint has conducted this year. In January, Sprint said it would cut 8,000 people from its workforce. Then, in July Sprint relocated 6,000 of its workforce over to Ericsson when the IXC handed over network management functions to the European vendor's services arm.
The cuts should not be all that surprising. Sprint's wireline subscriber base continued to dwindle in the third-quarter. While the company said it was seeing increased adoption of IP-based services rise as legacy voice and data dropped, it was not enough to curb a $478 million loss in the third-quarter. And while the cable operators have been the mainstay of its wholesale voice business, growth has been relatively stagnant.
For more:
- Wall Street Journal via Dow Jones has this article
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