Sprint to lay off thousands

Not good news coming from the nation’s No. 3 wireless carrier. Reports circulated yesterday that Sprint will lay off “several thousand” employees. The move comes just a month after they announced Daniel Hesse as their new CEO.

While the move could ostensibly be tied to him, it’s easy to forget that Sprint pulled a similar maneuver just a year ago, laying off 5,000 workers in January of 2007.

The analysts at Reuters hint at Sprint’s third quarter losses as a reason for enacting these layoffs. This could signal an even greater loss in the fourth quarter, which they have not officially announced yet — though analysts have put out discouraging forecasts. The big squeeze was that most of Sprint’s third quarter losses were high-end customers, which trampled the bottom line. The continuing wrath of the subprime fallout has affected them, too, in the form of Boost Mobile, Sprint’s prepaid provider.

To date, Sprint has declined to comment on the layoffs. I can’t imagine them saying, when the time comes, anything other than: “It’s for the betterment of the company,” or something along those lines. [Reuters]

About the Author

Joe Pawlikowski is the Senior Editor at MobileMoo.com and has been covering the mobile industry full time since 2007. When he's not writing about the tech scene, he can be found discussing his personal love - baseball (and more specifically the New York Yankees) as well as writing on his personal blog.