Thousands of jobs will be cut at Sprint as the company’s owners, Japan’s SoftBank, continues to try and turn the struggling wireless carrier around. SoftBank’s chief executive Masayoshi Son announced the cuts during a quarterly earnings call, reports The Wall Street Journal, in which SoftBank reported net profit of ¥213 billion — lower than analysts’ expectations of ¥262 billion. Sprint itself announced earlier this week that it had its lowest cancellation rate in history, but it failed to add new customers as fast as its rivals and posted a $585 million net loss in the second quarter.
Thousands of job cuts coming at Sprint
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The job cuts are not unexpected. Last month, Sprint’s new chief financial officer announced that he wanted to cut costs at the company by $2.5 billion over the course of six months. These cuts included scrapping free snacks, freezing raises, reducing severance pay, increasing out-of-pocket healthcare costs, and now, layoffs. SoftBank remains dedicated to the turnaround (it recently increased its stake in Sprint while Son even bought a house near the company’s HQ to spend more time there) but the process looks to be a painful one.
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