Sprint Nextel

Sprint Nextel
Sprint Nextel is one of the largest telecommunications companies in the United States. Even before Sprint Nextel was formed from the merger, Sprint Corporation was going through a tough time. For the past five years, Sprint Corporation and Sprint Nextel were unable to grasp their industry. They continued to decline as a whole. In December 2002, Sprint decided to cut 1,000 jobs over the next year to consolidate operations. In 2003, the corporation under went a reorganization due to significant losses in the wireless division. In order to maximize profitability, in the spring of 2004, Sprint decided to implement an aggressive outsourcing plan. This plan would outsource 5000 to 6000 customer service jobs in the PCS division. The reason behind the cut is to save the company $2-$3 billion. (Reardon, 2007). Sprint already outsourced information technology jobs in the fall of 2003 overseas, in addition to the customer service jobs. Right before the merger, in the spring of 2005, the company let go 5300 more employees.
The company cut another 5000 employees earlier this year. “Growth has been hard to come by as Sprint Nextel has been besieged by ineffective marketing, uncompetitive handsets and churn in the Nextel subscriber base because of tightened credit requirements and degraded voice quality” (Anderson, 2007). Each time the company was not performing well, it was followed by layoffs and/or outsourcing. According to Kansas City Business Journal (2007), this number also includes employees who were attrition or voluntary separation packages that have yet to be completed. Although outsourcing seems to be a large part of their plan, the company still struggles to gain market share.
Recently, the company was looking into a possible joint venture of their WiMax unit. "At a minimum, because we have markets that bump up against each other, it would make sense to cooperate on how to utilize spectrum, how to coordinate on cell-site builds,...