Sprint's new CEO Marcelo Claure has only been on the job four days now, but has already called an all-hands meeting to lay out his first initiatives at the head of the carrier. The new Chief Executive, who was previously on the Sprint board and running his company Brightstar (which is also owned by SoftBank), laid out a pretty stark and clear path for where he sees Sprint moving in the coming months.
His first plan of action is to simplify and lower plan costs across the board at Sprint, recognizing that its "Framily" plans haven't been popular and are tough to sell to consumers. He also understands that the carrier is charging too much considering the quality of its network. "We're going to change our plans to make sure they are simple and attractive and make sure every customer in America thinks twice about signing up to a competitor," said Claure, indicating that price changes are coming as soon as next week. (Could that be the upcoming Sprint 'Take the Edge Off' event?)
The next plan of action for Claure is to improve Sprint's network, which has had a rocky path to improvement as it transitioned from 3G to WiMax and now onto LTE, dumping iDEN in the process. He said that the network improvements have taken too long, and he recognizes that popular opinion of Sprint's network is not positive. He hopes to leverage Sprint's large spectrum holdings, which is something it only recently started to do with its new Spark LTE technology.
The third pillar of Claure's plan is to start cutting costs around Sprint. While it isn't necessarily a fun topic to address your employees about, Claure expressed that job cuts will be a necessary part of pulling Sprint out of the red eventually. He reiterated that he thinks that Sprint has some of the best employees around, and with the incoming changes they'll have even better tools to work with to make Sprint a better carrier all around.
It's going to be a long road to recovery for Sprint, and changes that Claure begins to put into motion now may take several months or years to move the carrier in the right direction. He's certainly saying the right things right now, but executing those ideas is the tough part.
Source: Light Reading
