
Sprint's shares plunged more than 15% Friday morning after the company said it will cut about 4,000 jobs and close 125 stores to cut costs to improve its financial performance, the company announced Friday i
n a statement. Sprint's shares sank $2.06 to $9.51 in early trading Friday.
Sprint (NYSE:
S), the No. 3 wireless carrier, said the action would lower labor costs by about $700-$800 million annually. Sprint said the jobs cuts would occur nationally, and would include managers.
The action comes after the company announced that it lost an additional 683,000 customers last quarter, which brought 2007 customer losses to 1.2 million.
No 3. carrier Sprint has been stung by customer departures, as customers have been lured to competitors
AT&T (NYSE:
T) and
Verizon Wireless (NYSE:
VZ), which feature more-popular phones/PDAs and better service. Moreover, although Sprint's call quality and network has improved in the past six months, Sprint has found it difficult to reverse the company's earlier reputation as one of the worst call networks in the mobile sector. In addition to Sprint's aforementioned attrition problem, analysts believe that reputation is holding down subscriber recruitment.