Sprint to Move Headquarters to Kansas
Date: February 13, 2008 08:12PM
By Cecilia Kang
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 13, 2008; 2:45 PM
Sprint Nextel said today it will move its Reston headquarters to Overland Park, Kan., where its maintains another corporate base, following America Online as the second major high-tech company in months to depart from the Washington region.
It was unclear how many employees at the Reston campus would be affected by the relocation, as the company is offering voluntary retirement packages as part of its plan to reduce staff worldwide by 4,000. Yet the wireless carrier said Sprint will continue to maintain sizable operations locally, reducing the number of office buildings it operates from nine to seven. A limited number of executives would be affected by the relocation, Spring said in a news release. The company has 60,000 employees around the globe; it employs 4,400 people in the Washington area.
The decision was widely expected and the latest move by new Chief Executive Dan Hesse to shake up the beleaguered wireless provider, which has lost more than 1 million subscribers in the last year to competitors and seen its stock price decline by 43 percent. After the merger between Sprint and Nextel in 2005, the combined companies maintained two corporate headquarters -- a symbol of the inefficiencies that have led to Sprint's financial troubles and tarnished its reputation among users, Hesse has said.
"After a thorough review, we determined that this change is necessary now so that our leadership team can concentrate on improving our company's operations and create a single, performance-based culture," Hesse said in a statement today.
Hesse took over the company in December after the ouster of Gary Forsee, who oversaw Sprint's troubled merger with Nextel. In the two months since he took over, Hesse has replaced its executive ranks with a new chief financial officer, chief marketing officer and president of sales and distribution. The company has also written off about $31 billion related to the Nextel merger. This week, it appointed to its board an activist shareholder who has pushed for sweeping changes at the firm.