KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Overland Park, Kansas, based Sprint is warning of more possible layoffs if its merger with T-Mobile is not approved.
This week, Sprint’s CEO Michel Combes sent a letter to the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.
In the letter, Combes writes Sprint faces significant challenges that “prevent us from thriving as a stand-alone company.” He goes on to write, “we lack the spectrum assets, scale and financial resources needed to compete aggressively against the larger wireless companies.”
In the past four years, Combes says Sprint has had to remove $6 billion in costs and cut thousands of jobs. According to the letter, Sprint has reduced its workforce from 43,000 in 2010 to 28,000 today.
Combes says many of those reductions have been at company headquarters in Overland Park.
He goes on to write that Sprint’s cuts have also affected the local community. According to Combes, Sprint had around 4,300 non-employees working at its headquarters. That number today sits at 2,000.
“Sprint’s future affects not just Sprint’s employees, but the entire Kansas City community,” Combes wrote.
The letter also says despite all the cuts, Sprint is not profitable. It states, “excluding last year’s paper gain (a result of corporate tax reform), Sprint has lost $25 billion over the past decade.”
In the final page of the three-page letter, Combes detailed what the future could look like for Sprint if the merger is not approved.
“Without the merger, the trajectory for Sprint will worsen and Sprint’s prospects will be limited,” he wrote. “Sprint will be forced to further reduce its operating expenses, which means more job reductions in Kansas City and throughout the company, and our future as a stand-alone company will be in jeopardy.”
Combes also alerted Sprint employees to the letter he sent to the FCC. In a message to them, he said the merger would add thousands of new jobs. Absent a merger however, the company will be ready with a plan.
“Those options as a stand-alone would be limited, and we would have to make some difficult choices about what direction to go and how to operate most effectively and efficiently,” Combes wrote to employees.
