T-Mobile USA will continue with its restructuring, which will lead to 900 more job cuts at the nation's No. 4 carrier, according to a memo that T-Mobile CEO Philipp Humm sent to employees.
The memo, obtained by The Verge, was confirmed in a separate statement that T-Mobile sent to FierceWireless and other media outlets. A T-Mobile spokeswoman confirmed to FierceWireless that a net total of 900 jobs will be lost, noting that some jobs will be eliminated, some outsourced and some created as a result of the changes within the company.
In the memo to employees, Humm said the company is moving to "a new structure that further aligns our costs with our revenue realities, enables teams who support our field organization to act and react with greater speed and effectiveness to customer and market opportunities, and better positions us to return to growth."
He said that the new structure "required difficult decisions that will impact some of our employees," and that the company will be reaching out this week to individual employees whose teams are affected. "Changes will include some position eliminations and changes to individual roles and responsibilities," Humm said in the memo. "It is important to emphasize these impacts to employees result from business decisions. We have tremendous employees here at T-Mobile and we truly wish we could retain all our talent, but our business realities require hard choices."
T-Mobile announced a net loss of 1,900 jobs in March to consolidate the number of its call centers around the country from 24 down to 17. At the time, the carrier also said it would restructure other parts of its business by the end of May. The company did not specify what those changes might be, but at the time a T-Mobile spokesman told FierceWireless that the planned changes will not affect customer service representatives in the remaining 17 calls center, network technicians and engineers or front-line employees at T-Mobile's branded retail stores.
Humm said the new structure will allow the company to focus on future growth, including "modernizing our network to LTE, repositioning the T-Mobile brand and aggressively pursuing the B2B segment where we plan to add 1,000 positions over the next few years."
Parent company Deutsche Telekom plans to spend up to $4 billion upgrading T-Mobile's network. Speaking at the 40th Annual J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference, Deutsche Telekom CFO Timotheus Höttges said the company would be able to stand on its own as it transitions to LTE next year, and would not need to partner or merge with another carrier. However, he also noted that the carrier plans to cut $900 million in costs, though he did not give a specific timeframe for the cuts. He said T-Mobile might reinvest some of that money into the business.
For more:
- see this The Verge article
- see this Seattle Times article
- see this AllThingsD article
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