T-Mobile has announced plans to lay off 5,000 staff in the next five weeks, representing 7 percent of its total workforce.
In a letter to the employees on Thursday, T-Mobile Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mike Sievert noted that the reductions will largely affect corporate and back-office jobs that are “primarily duplicative” to other roles and will reduce the company’s middle management layers.
Further, the company plans to reduce its spending on “external workers and resources,” but its retail and “consumer care” staff who work directly with customers will not be affected.
“What it takes to attract and retain customers is materially more expensive than it was just a few quarters ago,” Sievert said.
As businesses struggle with an unstable economic climate, T-Mobile's layoffs follow months of central layoff notifications from various other technological companies, including Microsoft and Meta.
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T-Mobile reported sales down 2.5% year over year and net subscriber additions down slightly from the same period in the prior year in its most recent quarterly earnings report last month.
However, it also announced record-low customer turnover and profit growth.
Since last August, T-Mobile's stock price has decreased by more than 7%. Following the announcement of layoffs, shares were trading lower by about 1%.
Additionally, Sievert said that in the three years since closing T-Mobile’s acquisition of rival carrier Sprint, it has been working to streamline the combined businesses and accelerate the build-out of its high-speed internet business.
However, he suggested it was important for the company to now narrow its focus.
“It is clear that doing everything we are doing and just doing it faster is not enough to deliver on these changing customer expectations going forward,” he said.
“Today’s changes are all about getting us efficiently focused on a finite set of winning strategies.”
T-Mobile plans to notify employees who will be laid off by the end of September. According to a Thursday securities filing, the company estimates it will incur a pre-tax charge of around Kes .65.2 billion in the September quarter related to the reductions.
Sievert told employees that affected employees will receive “competitive severance packages” based on tenure, accelerated stock vesting, access to career transition services, and other benefits.
He added that the company is not planning additional, widespread employee reductions in the foreseeable future.
